Allan Dorne – IT Technical Services Manager, PSIS.
When major financial institution PSIS deployed a new application using SharePoint, end users experienced very slow response times with both the new application and other network-based services. Users’ frustration levels were high, productivity was reduced and there was a general perception that the application wasn’t delivering as expected. We were called in to review the network and recommend a solution.
Our initial diagnosis showed that the new application had created significantly more network traffic resulting in some routers running at 100% CPU utilisation. Rather than recommending an upgrade to new, faster routers, we reconfigured the network to reassign the roles of existing network devices to optimise traffic flows. This had an immediate impact by reducing router CPU utilisation by 20% and deferring the cost and delays associated with replacing them.
Although this had a positive impact, user response times were still unacceptable and again, the problems indicated an issue within the network. After further review and analysis of network traces, we recommended some server network configuration changes which had an immediate effect. We saw a further 10% reduction in CPU utilisation, but most importantly, user response times improved dramatically as processing loads and bottlenecks were removed from the servers.
PSIS and their end users are happy, the network and servers are performing well, the new application has been well received and no additional expenditure was required for hardware or software.