CA`s CleverPath Portal sets new standard for scalability

Computer Associates International, Inc (CA) today announced that recent performance test results indicate that its CleverPath Portal can support more than 2.4 million users. This assessment was based on hit-per-second data verified by Doculabs, Inc (

), an independent research and consulting firm, and confirms the position of CA`s CleverPath Portal as a leader in enterprise information portals.

Doculabs confirmed that CleverPath Portal delivers near-linear scalability - its throughput, access speed and ability to support large numbers of users increases proportionally to additional underlying hardware. Such scalability and performance are vitally important to organisations that must support a growing user community and an expanding range and volume of portal content.

"Scalability is a critical issue for portals, since any anticipated productivity gains are likely to be lost if users begin to experience sluggish performance or poor availability as usage increases," said Jeetu Patel, executive vice president of research at Doculabs. "By achieving these impressive results, CA`s CleverPath Portal has proven its ability to support high-volume utilisation and to grow with evolving enterprise needs."

The performance of CleverPath Portal was documented in a variety of test scenarios, and measured based on predefined thresholds of sustained throughput and response time. Variables tested included the number of hits-per-second, types of transactions (read vs writes), available bandwidth, and network configuration.

CleverPath Portal delivered 8 500 UPT (users per thousand dollars), when all the initial hardware and software costs associated with the benchmark were taken into account. Based on these results, CleverPath Portal is the price/performance leader in the enterprise information portal market.

The test environment comprised CleverPath Portal 3.5 software running on standard business-use hardware. The hardware consisted of three Intel-based servers running Windows 2000 Advanced Server; each machine was configured with four 700MHz processors and 2GB of RAM. The architecture in CleverPath Portal 3.5 has been carried forward in release 4.0, which CA announced today.

The results demonstrated that the three-server CleverPath Portal environment achieved baseline throughput of 1 200 hits-per-second. Using the assumption that 500 hits-per-second represents peak load for a 1 million-user site, CA determined hits-per-second performance of CleverPath Portal, and its near-linear scalability, extrapolates into the ability to support an estimated 2.4 million users.

"We are delighted with the excellent results of the benchmark, as independently validated by Doculabs," said Yogesh Gupta, CA senior vice president and CTO. "CleverPath Portal continues to deliver exceptional value with its comprehensive functionality, unrivalled performance, high scalability, and strong support for a broad range of platforms, content, and application resources."

More information about test configuration and results is available in a detailed white paper that can be viewed at http://www3.ca.com/Solutions/Collateral.asp?id=1735.