Systems Alliance Blog

Many of us work in an environment where productivity is hurt because centralized information is not available where and when it's needed. Some examples:

• Let's start with me. I'm in sales.  I am always mobile, but can only update my forecast when sitting down, plugged in, and logged into my CRM application.
• If you manage a retail chain every price check requires a phone call logging into a terminal, or a trip to the customer service desk.
• Suppose  you manage the housecleaning staff for a major hotel. Procedural consistency is critical.  But your staff needs to take a 30 minute walk to double check how to handle exceptions.
• Or your team of lawyers spends an hour traveling to the office to look up a precedent.
  

All of these bottlenecks would be gone if we could instantly access the information we needed, where and whenever necessary.  In most cases, ROI has been discussed year over year about how to get proprietary handheld devices to the workforce without crippling IT, tech support, the CFO, or all of the above.

Now, what if we stop thinking about MAKING people use a hand-held device for their job and start talking about ALLOWING them to do so.  Today, many of us are already mobile enabled to a varying degree. And based on current trends for smart phone adoption, we’re on our way to a crowded mobile Web – one with a myriad of applications (just consider what Apple has unleashed with its App Store!). 

Why is this important?  Because if we ALLOW people to use their own preferred device to improve the way they work, they tend to do so.  Let's look at the examples above to see how:

• I found an app for my Blackberry that allows me to log into my CRM application and update my forecast while leaving a meeting.
• A retail chain saves millions of dollars by Web-enabling their price book, removing both paper and custom-app developers from the cost structure.  Their employees want to run price searches from the aisle with their customer, not from the front of the store where the Web terminal is.  By mobile-Web-enabling the application, productivity, morale, and customer service has improved.
• A hotel chain spends millions in overtime because exception handling in house-keeping is so time consuming.  (Broken fixtures, late checkouts, unexpected biohazard situations.)  A simple Web interface to the facilities application was a great start at coordinating resources.  By mobile-Web-enabling that application, staff didn't even need to leave the floor in order to initiate the coordination.
• A mobile-Web-enabled CMS is all a law firm needed to give attorneys secure access to the thousands of documents they can reference from the office, home, Starbucks or anywhere business and their Blackberries take them.

It's pretty clear the “consumerization” of the Web experience – from the mobile Web to the App Store – is driving a new business opportunity unknown five years ago.  If you build it, they will come. 

If you're interested in jumpstarting a mobile Web initiative, Systems Alliance can help – from modeling a business case to delivering a full-blown mobile site. Visit our Web Effectiveness site to learn more or call 1-877-797-2554 to schedule a consultation.

Most IT pros responsible for Web environments understand the need for adequate network, CPU and memory to ensure Web server performance.  But how many consider the benefits of using solid state drives (SSDs) to increase Web performance?

SSD technology is finally going mainstream – and it can dramatically increase the performance of your Web environment.  For those of you paying attention, you know the cost of SSDs has also dropped significantly in recent months.

Cool. SSDs are more affordable and offer great performance advantage – they just need to be properly configured. Let’s find out how…

By their nature, Web environments are read-intensive.  Now, consider a high-volume Web environment, such as a college during fall enrollment. The course catalogue pages are getting pounded like never before.  If we could somehow cache them onto a SSD, which provides 100x the IOPS of an HDD, the resulting read performance of the catalog application would increase several-fold.

So how do we do this?  The best way is with ZFS (Zettabyte file system) available for free with the Solaris 10 operating system. 

ZFS lets you designate a SSD as a cache device with one simple command.  For example, let’s assume we’re using Oracle’s Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server.  This particular server – based on Sun’s Chip Multi-Threading technology – is optimized for Web performance.  It also has the capacity to contain up to 16 disk drives, including on-board SSDs. As we continue analyzing our Web server, we decide we’re going to have two mirrored drives for our operating system and two drives for our Web content.  Let’s add one more drive, a 32 GB SSD to act as our read cache for the Web server.  Remember, in this example, all disks are internal.  We can also do this on a SAN, but that’s for another day.

Now we have our operating system loaded and mirrored on our OS drives, and we’re ready to create our content space on the remaining drives, using ZFS to optimize the SSD as read cache.  Let’s assume the physical disk device names of our content disks are HDD0, HDD1, and SSD0.

Here’s how we do it.  Simply login as “root” and issue the following command:

# zpool create <webcontent poolname> mirror HDD0 HDD1 cache SSD0  <webcontent poolname> is whatever you decide to call the content storage pool.

We’re done.  You’ve just created a ZFS storage pool, mirrored for data protection that will utilize the SSD as read cache.  ZFS will dynamically store a second copy of the target data on the SSD for fast retrieval, dramatically increasing the performance of your Web pages.

Now you need to create the desired ZFS file systems within the pool, and you’re ready to add content.  The process of creating the ZFS file system is also easy and is described nicely here.

Let’s recap:

• SSDs are becoming more affordable
• ZFS is free with Solaris 10
• Configuration is easy
• You gain significant performance advantage

To learn more about Web effectiveness, content management and using SSDs to optimize your Web environment, get in touch with your Systems Alliance rep, call 1-877-797-2554 or click here for a no-obligation assessment.