Actualidad -- Febrero 08, 2006
CENTERS OF EXCELLENCE SHARPEN CSC'S FOCUS ON INNOVATION
CSC's Systems Performance Center Helps Clients Predict ScalabilityIf CSC clients need to confirm that a system can handle 10 times its current volume, determine if a migration to a new computing platform is practical or find out how much increased traffic a search engine can handle, they turn to CSC's System Performance Center of Excellence (COE).
One of CSC’s 17 Centers of Excellence, the Systems Performance COE conducts rigorous examinations that provide an in-depth understanding of a system's architecture and how it will perform in various circumstances. In some cases, the center runs benchmarks to generate workloads comparable to real workloads and tests them to get a comprehensive, concrete view of how the system will perform. But the center's distinguishing quality is its ability to extract metrics and use mathematical modeling to predict scalability.
"A performance benchmark will confirm that an order entry system can do five orders per second, but it won't tell you if the system can do 10," says Phillip Czachorowski, director of CSC's Systems Performance COE. "What we do is determine the CPU cost per order and model it to project how much more or less the system can handle. We have a lot of experience coming up with metrics."
Saving time and money in production
CSC formalized the Systems Performance COE five years ago, transforming its internal expertise in performance testing DB2, Oracle, SQL and Data-Miner into a service offering. The center helps clients by discovering performance issues before a system is built or deployed, when it is less expensive to fix problems. New tools, methodologies and best practices make the process of performance testing systems less costly and more accurate and efficient. The center conducts performance testing, technology evaluations and performance modeling at a dedicated laboratory in Waltham, Massechussetts, and a data center in Southborough, Massechussetts.
At any stage of a project, the center can be brought in to make system assessments as an independent evaluator. The scope ranges from questions about a system that doesn't exist to how a system in operation would work in a new environment. The cost and goals of the project determine if benchmarking or modeling is required, or a combination of tactics that acts as a shortcut to building a complete system. For example, if a client has to look up content in a database three times to confirm items are in stock, or track the status of the nearest shipment, the center only needs to be able to perform three database lookups. "We're not doing real orders, so the data in the database is irrelevant," says Czachorowski. "But the database we create for testing has to have the same characteristics and has to do the same type of computer processing."
Modeling gives the center a scientific way of making assessments and the ability to home in on which workload needs to be tested. A workload may be modeled only to find that it would be problematic. The question the center then asks is what it would take to make that workload functional. "We are clever about using modeling to target areas for more comprehensive testing or to make projections," says Czachorowski.
"The value we bring is the approach," he adds. The center evaluates the problem, asks the real question that needs to be answered, and weighs the data and the project's place in the lifecycle to derive the most sensible solution. "Clients have time constraints because of budgets," says Czachorowski. "We come up with what we think is a reasonable approach, accuracy of the data versus the cost, to provide good answers for their investment. It's important that they get out of it what they think they need so that there are no surprises at the end."
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