AlwaysOn.biz solves your I.T. problems that impact the success of your business. How do we accomplish this feat? We accomplish this by leveraging our diverse experience and expertise to focus on the right problems and provide the corrective actions to maintain business continuity. Let me give you some examples.

Businesses continually change and adapt to compete in the market place. For their I.T. Departments; this means they have to keep up with the demands of the business with new solutions to support the ongoing evolution of the business. For the I.T. function this equates to a constant change in software and hardware to meet these demands. So how does the I.T. Department know how much hardware to procure to adequately support what the business is asking them to provide? Many I.T. Departments use historical knowledge and experience to make an educated guess. While they typically make fairly good decisions, they tend to overshoot to be on the safe side. And sometimes they undershoot when it’s something new and they don’t have much experience with it. Is there a better way?

The better way is to use a simulation modeling tool to “right size” the hardware solution. While the process described above is adhoc with very little data to support the decision, a simulation model will provide a good hardware recommendation based on solid data. We’ve used this capability repeatedly in the WebSphere Business Integration (WBI) space. In one scenario the Systems Engineering Team undershot their estimate when they did not realize that several large applications were moving over to utilize WBI to integrate with a third party application. Our simulation model predicted an outage of the WBI solution when the projected volume overwhelmed the current Production hardware. Given our recommendations, the Systems Engineering Team made an emergency CPU upgrade on the hardware and avoided a certain application outage. Our predictions prevented a disruption of the business and advanced the creditability of the I.T. Department as they proactively managed their assets to support the goals of the business.

While the simulation model is an excellent tool to answer capacity related questions it can also solve performance problems in conjunction with performance testing tools. Again, we utilized the combination of these tools to solve performance issues with a WBI solution. Using our simulation tools we created a Performance Model that represented our software application behavior. Taking this approach we simulated how the WBI components (Adapters for example) behaved in an overall solution topology. There are many parts of a modern I.T. solution and the simulation model helped us isolate the application bottlenecks. Using this information we were able to increase the application throughput by over 100% with the same hardware. These improvements were documented with a targeted load test. Based on these improvements the business was able to support twice as many customers without procuring any additional hardware. In addition, this problem resulted in many time-out conditions that had a significant financial impact to the business. Once our application tuning recommendations were implemented, the time-outs were resolved.

What we’ve illustrated with these brief examples is the possible results when the problems are approached with a disciplined engineering mindset. Good decisions and decisive actions are based on having the right data. As you explore other areas of our website you will discover our successes and how we proved these accomplishments by presenting the right data.