David Gehringer Director, Product Marketing

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David GehringerDirector, Product Marketing
Tuning Production Systems
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IT Applications Drive Business

• Applications increase revenue or decrease costs
• Applications effectiveness can be measured by
• Invoices / hour
• Pageviews / day
• Records updated / day
• Completed transactions / hour
• Response time
• Etc..

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IT wasted 500B in 2001
Gartner Says 20 Percent of Corporate IT Budgets
Wasted Globally in 2001 on Inefficient
Information Communication Technology Spending

• Typical areas of misspend include
• 'over specified' hardware
• over specified network infrastructure
• unnecessary customization of software packages
• poor central control of software licensing
• projects that never see the light of day
  (especially true during the e-business hype)

Production Tuning Can Prevent This Waste
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Top Production Problems

• Systems are very complex
• Millions of moving parts
• Cant separate problems between infrastructure
  and app(s)
• Intermittent non-reproducible problems can be
  chronic
• No way to ensure security under peak load
  conditions
• Changes, changes, changes..

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New Application Roll Out?
It meets all tested and expected response time
measurements users are happy. 14
We cross our fingers AND toes. 12
Our IT department is overwhelmed with calls. 15
We hear, it worked fine in testing. 34
We just add bandwidth to get rid of the
problem.9
Our company loses revenue, time and
credibility. 7
Our tools did not identify what was wrong. 9
Source Gartner 2002
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Amazing Statistics

• 98 of the environments have critical problems
• Sites only scale to 15 of design capacity
• Performance can often be increased by 400
• Security and production performance are related

(Based on 2,000 ActiveTune engagements)
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Bottlenecks identified in all areas ofWeb
application infrastructure

• Infrastructure
• Network
• Computing H/W
• Security
• Application
• Database
• Application Server
• Web Server

40 Infrastructure
60 Application
Systems contain multiple bottlenecks in both
application and infrastructure areas
Data gathered from over 2,000 tuning sessions
(September 2001)
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Why Applications Dont Scale inProduction
The testing / QA lab is not the production
system!!

• QA is a scaled down version of production
• Does not have production infrastructure in
  testing
• Firewalls, Load balancers, cache servers, etc..
• The internet and its infrastructure is absent
• Switches, routers, gateways, Bandwidth, ISP
  peering, etc..
• Security systems are not represented
• Hardware, software, encryption, ect..

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Production systems are incredibly complex
Production systems include multiple end users for
CRM, ERP, B2B, B2C, Intranet, Internet
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Enterprise Application Testing Performance
Monitoring
Monitoring 24 x 7 in Production Systems
Application Testing in Lab
Test Planning
Requirements
Iterative Testing
Dev.
Functional Regression Testing
Load Stress Testing
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Initial Application Release onto Production
Infrastructure Requires Tuning Optimizing

• Baseline performance on real production system
• Maximize utilization of existing investments
• Application
• Infrastructure
• Security

Application From Testing or Staging environments
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Ongoing Discrete Events In ProductionRequire
Tuning Optimizing
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What Business Problems does Performance
Optimization Solve?

• Reduced costs
• Reduction in hardware and software purchase
• Redeployment of resources to other projects
• Revenue Protection
• Increased reliability
• Higher end user experience
• 3rd party validation
• Ensuring that the system and partners can scale
• Check security infrastructure resilience to load

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The Answer is

• Production Tuning
• We utilize experts, industry standard tools,
  proven processes to systematically tune each tier
  and component of the production system to
  maximize utilization of the system and improve
  performance.

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Ok, but how do you do it?
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Tuning Joins All Areas
Security
Hosting Equip. Routers ISP Peering Switches ISP
Bandwidth Load balancers Gateways Web
Servers Cache Servers LAN / WAN
Application Servers Databases Middleware Back
Office Client servers Legacy system 3rd
Party Credit Cards service .NET, SUN 1 services
Firewalls IDS Systems DDOS system
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The Tuning Process
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Security System
2
Application(s)
1
Infrastructure Network
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The Tuning ProcessDrilling Down from the Global
to the Specific
Entire System Response time unacceptable

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Infrastructure Network
Problem Resolution Increase server connections
Component Testing App, Web, DB, FW, etc..
Problem Isolation Application Server doesnt scale
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Tuning Requires Targeting Tiers DeliveringLoad
From An End-user Perspective
Business Processes
ISP
ISP
ISP
Router
Router
Load Balancer
Application
Server
Storage Mgmt
DB Mgmt
Firewall Mgmt
System Mgmt
Load Mgmt
Net1 Mgmt
Net2 Mgmt
Network Mgmt
Tier specific sessions

• Tuning targets system one tier at a time
• Creates a baseline of performance

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Key Tuning Procedures
Application
Infrastructure
Security
Check Scalability Server connection capacity,
release, and renew Business process
optimization Database process search
validation Page construction check
Load Balancer scheme strategy Check
Bandwidth Border router and network
validation Caching algorithm optimization ISP
capacity, SLA, and connection validation
Security operation under heavy traffic DDOS
system operation check Vulnerability
Scan Firewall connection DMZ, throughput
validations Confirm IDS operation
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Production Tuning Advantages

• Maximize Infrastructure Software Utilization
• Maintains Optimal Performance
• Save Time
• Protect Revenue
• Security Performance Check
• Validate 3rd parties scale
• Establish Monitoring Benchmarks
• Base-lining system capacity
• Fail-over testing

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Tuning Enterprise Applications

• Tuning can be leveraged for
• B2B, B2C, CRM, ERP package apps, etc
• Internet based applications
• Intranet, WAN, LAN applications
• Mercury Interactive has validated and proven this
  approach with our ActiveTune service

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Questions