Customers who engage with IBM's HVWS team can expect a thorough review of their current workload patterns, site architecture, and infrastructure, followed by recommendations for future action. Available services include tuning page download times, analyzing transaction flows, developing and testing prototypes for scalability and availability, and piloting Web applications. As volumes continue to rise, many customers are also confronted with the challenge of transforming their businesses into successful e-businesses, where implementing a consistent architecture is critical. In their work, the HVWS team determines whether availability and performance are products of the scalability of a site's individual hardware and software components. Understanding the scalability of a system's components and applying appropriate scaling techniques can greatly improve the site's availability and performance.
Specific techniques are more effective for some components than others.
Scaling techniques are especially useful in multi-tier architectures when you evaluate components associated with the Web server, the application servers, and the database servers. With help from IBM's HVWS team, a large online trading customer was able to exploit transactional XML to scale their transaction rate from two transactions per second to 100 transactions per second. Many large IBM customers are already enjoying the benefits of the knowledge and skills accumulated by the HVWS team. Early releases of tools are being used to analyze site performance, followed up by documented practices that can improve the site. Workshops are scheduled this year to propagate related information, skills, and tools.