Taking Preventive Action Against Performance Problems

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Taking Preventive Action Against Performance Problems

9/1/2004

Loyola has four campuses, three in the greater Chicago area and the Rome Center in Italy. Loyola’s nine schools and colleges include arts and sciences, business administration, education, graduate studies, law, medicine, nursing, professional studies and social work. Loyola's total enrollment is 13,000 students, which includes 7,500 undergraduates; students represent 50 states and territories, and 82 foreign countries.

Loyola University-Chicago was jumping from the mainframe computer era straight into the Internet age. Loyola University-Chicago had decided to decommission its old main frame and set up a three-tier architecture on its metro-area network, which links three city campuses. The Peoplesoft 8 family of Web-enabled enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications would be the foundation of an administrative portal enabling students to register online for classes, view grades, read campus news, seek financial aid, deal with billing issues and more.
Though Peoplesoft 8 was an emerging solution for educational institutions, a number of other schools had already taken the leap. But rumor had it that the new applications were plagued by performance problems.

“We’d heard some universities had just kept adding more servers to try to speed application access, but it wasn't helping,” said Jerry Sanders, Loyola's chief information officer. “So we went in knowing that, even if we acquired a lot of server hardware, we would still have to deal with application performance issues. We had no mechanism in place to do any load balancing, a capability we knew would be critical.”

Then Sanders and his staff came across an article detailing the deployment of Peoplesoft 8 by another school, Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley. Santa Clara had been one of the earliest users of the Web-enabled version of the popular Peoplesoft ERP application suite, and had tried a number of solutions, including adding servers and using performance management/tuning software. Finally they had installed a new network appliance from Redline Networks of Campbell, Calif. (designs and manufactures network appliances) Redline’s E|X 3250 enterprise application processor is a multi-function platform that performs load balancing, data compression, TCP connection management and other server-offload tasks. Santa Clara’s application performance problems had disappeared.

Voice of Experience Leads Loyola to Solution

Before putting the E|X 3250 to work in front of Peoplesoft 8, Loyola's manager of server operations tested the unit on the university’s internal GroupWise e-mail/collaboration application. The E|X 3250 was installed in February 2004 between Loyola’s routers/switches and two GroupWise Web servers. “We had been looking at adding another Web server for GroupWise—at a cost of at least $7,500—and possibly a dedicated load balancer as well,” Sanders said. “But after the Redline was installed, users immediately commented that they saw a big performance improvement. They assumed we had put in a new server.”