Buying the latest and the greatest sounds like a good idea, but who can afford it? We look at ways you can get better performance and a better bottom line with your existing infrastructure.
It seems a fact of early 21st Century corporate life that boards are reluctant to approve any expenditure that won’t be recouped quickly. In this environment, forklift upgrades can be hard to justify, so IT managers and CIOs need tools and services that will squeeze the maximum performance from existing systems.
Another way of keeping the bean counters happy is to be open to alternatives, or better still, to seek them out. Instead of throwing more of the same resources at a problem—more or faster servers, more disks, more bandwidth—look for other ways of spending your money that will give the same or better results at lower costs. Rather than buying more bandwidth, consider buying something that will let you maximise the value of your existing links.
We’ll explore both these avenues in this guide to making the most of what you’ve got.
Finding the real problem
It is important to realise that response time can be one of the most important metrics from a user perspective. The shift to server farms and similar arrangements for running hardware in parallel means a high level of availability can be achieved relatively easily, but users do not consider an application is “available“ unless the response time is acceptably short.
Tools such as NetIQ’s AppManager allow IT managers to actively monitor response times and quickly identify the source of any problem that arises. Mark Lazarus, senior consultant at NetIQ, stresses that it’s important to check application flows, not merely the state of the network. For example, mail servers at two sites might stop communicating even though the inter-site link is functioning normally.
Response time might be the key criterion, but it still important to monitor the performance of individual servers in a farm, he says, along with all of the subsystems involved in particular transactions (Web server, database, legacy system, etc) in order to locate the seat of any problem.
Information collected in this way can be used for capacity planning purposes. By determining the trends, managers can better predict when a major change will be necessary or appropriate, such as a migration from direct attached storage to a SAN. The finely grained data may also show that a relatively small change to a particular system—the installation of extra RAM, perhaps—will extend its life. It also provides a basis for identifying spare capacity, load balancing and server consolidation.
“When you see an organisation in pain with lots of [IT] people running around, it’s usually because the systems were implemented without management tools to control them,“ he says.
Detailed understanding and performance measurement lets IT “get on the front foot“ when dealing with users, Lazarus says, especially as it allows accurate figures to take the place of perceptions.
While some products and services home in on particular aspects such as network or storage performance, “it’s always the business application not the technology“ that should be the centre of attention, according to Graham Sowden, managing director of Mercury Interactive.
Mercury’s process begins with the preparation of test scripts that will simulate users, with different scripts for different tasks. These scripts are used to present a test load to the system during an off-peak period, and the effects are measured. A load-related problem is usually uncovered quickly, says Sowden, and the underlying issue corrected by the client’s staff or its other providers. For example, if a firewall were the bottleneck, the security team would be called in. The test is repeated to ensure the problem really was fixed, and then the load is stepped up to reveal the next problem. This process continues over as many iterations as necessary. “Finding the problem is 80 percent of the work,“ he says.
Problems might only occur under particular types of load, explains Sowden, which makes them hard to spot without systematic testing.
“Don’t measure the components, measure the end [result],“ he says, pointing to the example of a major Australian bank that spent six months optimising a database so that it ran at 50 percent of capacity rather than 80 percent, but with no effect on the end-user experience.
A major US parcel service wanted to deliver a superior online tracking service and estimated the system would need to handle 100 transactions per second (TPS). It took delivery of two large servers (with another two on order), but found they could only reach 25TPS, so it was apparent that the other two servers wouldn’t get them to 100TPS. Mercury tuned the system over 12 weeks, and achieved 85TPS from two servers. This was deemed sufficient, so the company didn’t need to spend US$1.5 million on the other two servers.
Sowden says the ability to repurpose existing infrastructure is important. Some parts of the infrastructure last as long as 15 years, but business drivers change so rapidly that scrap-and-replace isn’t an option. A CIO will typically add more servers and extra bandwidth, but that “doesn’t relate to what the business is trying to do,“ he says. By focusing on business-related performance, Mercury’s methodology can deliver 400-500 percent improvements without adding hardware or software, Sowden claims. If you can prove that the user experience stays the same when you remove an application server, you can save money on software licences and redeploy the hardware in another role (eg, as a Web server) that will improve the user experience.
Most of Mercury’s customers are large organisations with distributed IT environments, such as banks, telcos, and governments. “We [organisations] have installed millions in IT, we’ve got to get more out of it,“ says Sowden.
Where Mercury’s process could be characterised as incremental refinement, Compass Management Consulting uses a benchmarking model to compare clients with the best performing organisations in 30 countries. The company has developed well-defined, detailed models for all aspects of IT, according to managing director Rawdon Simon. For example, the comparison may reveal excessive staff in managerial or administrative positions.
Compass measures the performance of all its clients in unit cost terms, and finds its new clients incur costs 20 percent higher than its long-term clients do. “If you’ve got a budget of $20 million a year, 20 percent is a lot of money,“ says Simon, adding that the cost of the service is small by comparison.
Once the gaps between current and best practice have been identified, Compass uncovers the causes and makes recommendations. These comparisons might reveal that the client spends much less time in the analysis and design phases of development projects than the best performing companies do, or that it has greater excess capacity in its mainframe systems.
“Quite often, people have a perception about where the problem lies,“ says Simon, but if the comparison shows that perception was wrong, that “saves millions of dollars spent going down the wrong route.“
“We are advisory consultants, not implementers,“ he says, explaining that this arrangement allows the company to maintain its objectivity. Its reports include specific details of what needs to be done, but “we’re reluctant to recommend any particular organisation to do the work.“
Compass’s market is similar to Mercury’s: banks, insurance companies, governments, telcos, and major industrial companies—organisations with larger IT budgets have the most to gain, explains Simon.
