| When Less is More |
Reducing Memory Footprints = Less Hardware + Improved ScalabilityBlack Pepper have recently completed a project for a major Banking client. Faced with an increased demand for their software services, our client needed to be confident that their application would scale effectively to meet higher volumes of users without the need to increase the underlying hardware and operational infrastructure linearly. Having examined the application in depth, Black Pepper recommended removing one component of the architecture - the Hibernate Object / Relationship Management package - and replacing this function with a bespoke persistence layer. Hibernate is an industrial strength Object / Relationship Management tool and in ordinary circumstances this tool is adept at handling the communications between rich Internet applications and disparate back end databases. However, in this example, the overhead of using a commercial package was proving inefficient: Hibernate is a "jack of all trades", and our client had a specific requirement to ensure secure, resilient transactions between hundreds and thousands of users and their back office systems. Black Pepper delivered the replacement software as an agile project, working with the client development team to convert their requirements into story points delivered in multiple iterations. This approach allowed the client to see the benefits of the new software almost immediately, and to fine tune the specific improvement parameters as the project evolved. At the end of the final iteration, the replacement persistence layer gave the following benefits:
In real terms, this project meant our client could deploy significantly more clients on considerably less hardware. Our client said "the memory savings are superb", our work was "a truly vast improvement" and we had "exceeded expectations". If you have similar issues with scalability and would like to reduce your hardware overheads why not contact us. |