Lab Poll You listen to some marketeers and it’s all so simple. Whatever form of server computing they are promoting is assumed to be the answer to everything.

Back in the real world, servers are obviously used for all kinds of stuff, from running boring back office systems, through highly dynamic Web applications, to core activities around development, testing and support.

With this in mind, how are you going to mix and match approaches to meet your server computing needs? Let us know in the mini poll below:

READER POLL: Dumb questions on server computing

In this poll we're asking what application types you have, and where you run them. To keep things simple we'll limit ourselves to the following applications/workloads.

• Lightweight workloads – production apps with occasional and/or lightweight resource needs e.g. project management tools, standalone database apps
• Predictable workloads – production apps with significant ongoing steady & predictable resource requirements e.g. ERP, production management
• Periodic workloads – production apps that kick in periodically with significant resource requirements, but otherwise tick over e.g. pay roll, billing
• Compute-intensive workloads – production apps with extremely high ongoing resource requirements e.g. high transaction systems, back end to web sales system
• Bursty workloads – production apps with fluctuating resource requirements that peak extremely highly e.g. online apps which are every now & then subject to promotions etc
• Software in development – systems and applications being developed in-house
• Testing environments – or example snapshots of live applications and databases used to test new features/functions
• Support/diagnostics – ad-hoc creation of servers that mirror live environments in a support context, e.g. for recreating and troubleshooting issues.