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"We wanted someone that could establish credibility with our development team, understand our architecture
and make meaningful recommendations."
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IEEE
Major Architecture Change - No Service Disruptions
IEEE is a non-profit, technical professional association of more than 360,000 individual members in more than 150 countries.
Through its members, the IEEE is a leading authority in technical areas ranging from computer engineering, biomedical technology
and telecommunications, to electric power, aerospace and consumer electronics, among others. Through its technical publishing,
conferences and consensus-based standards activities, the IEEE
- Produces 30 percent of the world's published literature in electrical engineering, computers and control technology,
- Holds annually more than 300 major conferences and
- Has nearly 900 active standards with 700 under development.
The IEEE Xplore web site provides an on line portal to IEEE publications for customers and access to abstracts for the general public. The site supports full-text access to IEEE transactions, journals, magazines and conference proceedings published since 1988 plus select content back to 1950, and all current IEEE Standards. This content delivery system contains over one million documents.
The Business Challenge
IEEE Xplore was being re-deployed using a J2EE architecture to meet increased customer demand.
It was critical that the new architecture be reliable under load and meet performance goals.
IEEE needed to cut over to the new, more scalable, architecture without customer visible disruptions to the Xplore service.
The new system needed to be highly reliable right from the start.
The Adeptis Approach
According to Gerry Grenier, Staff Director, Publishing Technologies, "
We had some prior experience with performance tests in the past but I was never entirely convinced the results were meaningful."
Gerry continued, "Adeptis took a different approach right from the start. The consultant focused on our customers and how they used the site. They created a model of site usage and reconciled it with our server logs. We started to gain confidence early in the process that this test would produce meaningful results."
Web server logs and an understanding of how IEEE customers used the site provided the foundation to create an accurate performance and reliability test.
The test was created using Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner. Mercury Interactive is the market leader in business technology optimization (BTO) and offers a comprehensive suite of automated tools. Their LoadRunner product is the industry standard for generating realistic user workloads with automated scripts and insuring that systems are reliable and scalable.
The test identified several performance issues, primarily with how the web site interacted with database and the performance of a document server. The Adeptis consultant worked with the IEEE development team to characterize the issues and gave recommendations on how they might be addressed.
According to Gerry, "We were looking for a vendor that could do much more than operate a testing tool. We wanted someone that could establish credibility with our development team, understand our architecture and make meaningful recommendations during the test and release process. The Adeptis consultant was able to do all of these things and he helped us track down some tricky problems."
Summary
IEEE Xplore went live on schedule and has been reliable in production.
The accurate and comprehensive performance test developed and executed by Adeptis helped IEEE avoid potential service disruptions that might have occurred because of the problems found during the test. IEEE was able to execute a major architecture change without any impact to their customers.
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