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Server Migration Testing
Posted on Thursday 18 January 2007
Business Continuity • Disaster Recovery • Remote Backup •
Storage Extension • Proof Of Concept
Many major corporations are in the process of migrating their data centers
from their back office to large regional data centers.
IT departments are legitimately concerned that such moves will adversely
affect their critical business applications.
In fact, a significant percentage of applications will experience quality-of-service
(QoS) and qual-ity-of-experience (QoE) problems.
What causes these problems?
An increase in application response times due to added network latency
and im-pairments. These are the most significant factors that will affect
the new network’s performance. Application latency can be much greater
than network latency. Add-ing even a modest amount of delay onto a network
When data centers are relocated, new services are often added. These include
access from the home or the road by us-ers with low-bandwidth and high-latency
network connections.
Many modern applications logically link objects across the network. If
any one object is moved, response times can in-crease in a significant
manner.
New and additional network equipment in-creases the potential for latency
and ex-cessive packet jitter.
In order to ensure a new network configuration will perform to acceptable
levels of operation, you must:
Create a virtual environment that will emulate the conditions of the new
net-work.
Establish pre-move baseline performance levels.
Use an Anue Network Emulator to inject projected latency and impairments
to the virtual network environment.
This will allow you to identify applications that will be impacted by
the data center migration. Some applications will require tuning to achieve
acceptable response levels. Some will fail altogether.
Once fixes are made and acceptable performance levels achieved, the virtual
test network will provide a level of confidence and prove that the migration
will succeed with minimal risk to busi-ness operations.
Remote Backups for Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
Remote backup centers have the same issues. Be sure to thoroughly test
for performance from these data centers. Otherwise, when the main data
center goes down, or access to it fails, and data access switches to your
backup center, your business will not be able to continue in a satisfactory
manner.
Succeeding in Server Migration
With careful planning and testing, IT organizations can successfully migrate
and upgrade their data center operations.
Case Study
A leading information technology services provider began a major project
to move its client’s mainframe systems to a central service center
1000 miles away. But before they could perform the migration it was critical
to test the impact of such a distance on mainframe applications. Using
network emulators from Anue Systems, the team introduced delay into the
live production environment between the users and the mainframe, exactly
emulating the setup they wanted to implement with the proposed network.
Transmission latency times of up to 80msec were emulated. Other impairments
included throttling down the bandwidth to 40Mbps, reordering and corrupting
Ethernet frames, and introducing packet jitter. All of these tests were
designed to match impairments that could occur on the deployed network.
The initial test showed that their client’s critical business applications
– as well as their ODBC (Open Data-base Connectivity) and JDBC (Java
Database Connectivity) applications – did not work with the delay
that the emulated distance introduced. With 20msec of latency their applications
were straining. Tasks that normally took 60 minutes to run took 100 minutes.
At 80msec, some applications stopped working entirely. Fortunately, the
team was able to detect the failure in real time and dynamically eliminate
the delay to avoid end user problems on the live network. The team then
focused on tuning and tweaking these applications to operate with the
several milliseconds of delay associated with the 1000-mile distance.
Once optimized, they re-tested the applications using the emulator and
validated that the performance was acceptable to end-users.
Since 1997, Gillaspy Associates has built
a solid reputation for developing strong relationships with our customers
by providing quality solutions and ongoing support.
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