Greenfield Technologies

Your Progress OpenEdge Database Expert

System Selection

Whether you're just getting started or you need to make a change Greenfield Technologies can help you find the right combination of systems and software to meet your objectives. We can even help you determine what your requirements are in measurable terms so that you know what you need to buy and why - and be able to plan your future needs.

Selecting a new system is one of the most significant challenges that an IT organization can face.

Typical System Selection issues include:

• What is the right hardware configuration to support our application?
• What release of Progress do we need?
• Will this application that we're thinking of buying work for my company?
• What system is needed to support a doubling of business next year?
• All of these vendors have systems that will work - which one is best for us?

A systematic approach to quantifying the business environment, the expected user load and the resource demands of software helps to avoid enormous potential for error - errors that lead to a spiral of extra costs, delayed rollouts, unhappy users, lost business, downtime, more and more costs... Or overspending without a clear connection between the business benefit and the expense.

Where to Start?

Perhaps the most difficult hurdle to properly sizing a system is simply taking the time to characterize the load. In many organizations there are no formal metrics that are routinely used to communicate the concept of "load". To some extent this is because there are many valid measurements of system load and no single number can cover all aspects of the question. Another key difficulty is that many of the questions that one wants to pose have a "business" component - and even fewer organizations have tied key business drivers to the technical metrics that reflect load.

So where can we start? At a fundamental level business applications accept input, process it in some way and output results. The details, of course, vary. And there are, of course, specific processes that are exceptions to these points. These exceptions are probably "well known" in your organization. You may know, for instance, that the month end trial balance takes 6 hours to run and that nobody else can get any work done if it runs during the business day. In fact the exceptions are the areas where you are most likely to have measurements pertaining to performance and perhaps even have service level agreements in place.

If you are fortunate enough to have an existing system that is being upgraded or replaced then you have, or can arrange to obtain, historical database performance data. This data enables the best possible basis for sizing a new system. If you do not have an existing system then estimates of these metrics must be obtained. Even very crude estimates are better than a blind guess. The most critical metrics to collect are:

• Business activity
• Logical IO operations/second
• Logical IO Operations per user
• Table Access Statistics
• Transactions (db commits) per second
• User/Session counts

If at all possible you need to collect this data and be familiar with it in order to understand the load on your systems. Notice that this data is all about the load - none of it speaks to the efficiency of the system. It only characterizes what is being asked of the system. It is certainly interesting and useful to know about things like OS reads, buffer hit ratios, latch timeouts, buffers flushed and so forth but they speak to efficiency - not load.

In addition to historical data regarding database load you must also quantify business load. Every business has key metrics that indicate to management how well things are going. Perhaps it is sales volume in dollars, number of orders processed or widgets produced. There are some numbers somewhere in the database that quantify load from a business perspective. Correlating these metrics with the database load gives you a very powerful tool for capacity planning and system sizing. Without it you're just guessing.

A typical project outline would cover the following:

• Business Overview, Drivers & Growth Plans
• Application Architecture, Configuration and "Hot Spots"
• Monitoring and Logging Tool Installation & Configuration
• System Inventory (CPU, RAM, Disk, Network, Configuration Details)
• Database Configuration (Startup Parameters, Block Sizes & Options, Placement & Configuration etc)
• Client Configuration (Startup Parameters, File Locations)

Initial deliverables include:

• System Load Baseline
• Database and Application Configuration Recommendations
• Hardware Configuration Alternatives
• Vendor Recommendations
• System Capacity Plan and Upgrade Paths
• Conversion Project Roadmap

Contact Greenfield Technologies today and we'll work together to select the right system for your business!