Lunn Poly has used performance-monitoring tools from
Veritas to overcome scalability problems that had prevented it from
fully deploying an application to modernise travel
booking.
Based on BEA's Weblogic 6.1 J2EE application server and Oracle 8i
database server, the application, called Genie, was designed to
provide 6,000 staff across 800 branches with sophisticated searches
to allow clients to put together holiday packages.
But when the roll-out started in early 2002, problems emerged. Rob
Halleron, senior technical architect at Tui UK, Lunn Poly's parent
company, said, "The threshold [in terms of users] was well below
what we needed."
His aim was to put 6,000 users on the Genie system with a service
level agreement that stated that the application's response time
should be 12 seconds or less, 90% of the time. However, the full
roll-out could not be completed.
"We could only get 1,500 users [on Genie] and the response time
exceeded our SLAs," he said.
Using Veritas i3, Halleron was able to identify a SQL statement in
the Oracle database that was running too slowly. "The SQL statement
had a response time of only half a second, but it was being called
quite frequently," he said.
This meant it used excessive processor resources. Once the SQL code
had been optimised, Halleron said the statement's response time was
down to 0.08 seconds, which removed the bottleneck, allowing Lunn
Poly to roll out Genie during 2003.
The Veritas i3 performance monitoring tool is now being used to
check new applications prior to implementation. Last week, Halleron
said Veritas i3 was used to test a new version of Genie designed to
provide car hire and hotel accommodation functionality.
The web server component of Genie runs on a Sun 280 server; the BEA
Web Logic 6.1 application server runs on a Sun 480; and a partition
of a Sun F15000 is used for the Oracle 8i database.