I’m pleased to announce a new collaborative whitepaper with ScaleArc entitled “Improving uptime and performance of legacy apps on Microsoft SQL Server“.
Performance tuning inefficient legacy applications can be a tremendous drain on development resources in an organization. Handling availability of the database layer of these applications can be an even larger challenge. ScaleArc can help improve both challenges by improving the availability of the database layer and accelerating common repetitive database queries from the application.
The past five years or so has seen a shift in people’s expectations for application performance. As they’ve seen their personal apps deliver continuous uptime and high performance, they’ve grown more frustrated with the slower performers in business.
Despite these business apps being critical to corporate performance, users have “just dealt with it” for years whenever they’re slow and unreliable. One challenge, of course, has been that these enterprise apps are much more complex than the personal apps, making it harder to update them. Plus, making the necessary changes to “update” the application might be out of the hands of an organization when they don’t control the source code, or are costly and time prohibitive to update when they do. A compelling alternative has emerged. Rather than recoding apps for improved uptime and performance in a database environment, consider the benefits of database load balancing software. A pioneer in this technology, ScaleArc has set out to make business application platforms more highly available and perform better by managing the traffic into the database servers. The ScaleArc software acts as an intermediary between the application and database layers. Sitting in between, it buffers database outages from impacting application availability and transparently accelerates the application’s performance, all without code or usability changes. This whitepaper explains the benefits of the ScaleArc software and shows benchmarking results of one feature set – app-transparent caching. In our tests, the ScaleArc software enabled a 5x improvement in the operations processed per minute and a drop in CPU consumption from a peak of 100% to a peak of 60%.
