Four pillars of performance management

High-performance IT systems don't guarantee that corporate strategies will drive down into the organisation, that they'll be converted into actionable metrics and that they'll expose the cause-and-effect relationships that deliver profitable insight to decision-makers.

Segregated, alienated, disparate and even poorly integrated systems, no matter how individually fast and reliable, will always fail to perform.

Corporate performance management systems rely on a systematic, integrated link to core processes that continue to rapidly fill data stores.

The ability to manage every aspect of performance reduces the risk of having systems that don't perform as well as businesses need them to - increasingly difficult as data volumes explode, user requirements and operating environments constantly change, and acceptable load windows shrink.

Real-world integration performance is more complex than a measurement of raw processing power, and is made up of four basic cornerstones:

* Throughput - the rate at which rows or bytes of data can be processed;
* Scalability - the ability to handle increasingly large and complex data integration scenarios;
* Availability - the resilience of the environment; and
* Performance manageability - the most important concept encompassing the ability to manage or monitor across the often distributed, heterogeneous environment, respond to change and maintain performance levels.

High throughput results in fresher data for the business, faster response to customers and increased operational efficiency.

But hardware is only part of the throughput equation. Multithreading and data partitioning, which enable complex processing tasks to be broken up and spread across hardware resources, also speed response times.

Another option is to capture only changed data and process it in real-time. This improves the freshness of data while focusing processing capacity only on data that has changed.

Scalability delivers a solid foundation for long-term performance.

Mervyn Mooi is director at Knowledge Integration Dynamics.

Highly scalable software reduces risk, allowing precise project windows estimation, flexible configuration and optimal resource utilisation. Scalability delivers a solid foundation for long-term performance.

To optimise scalability, users must map out expected data volume growth and batch or real-time processing requirements.

If a resource isn't available in the wake of a component failure, then it has no throughput, scalability or manageability. But not all systems are equally important. For some applications and industries system outages can cost lives. But more often, there is a grey area, and a certain percentage of downtime is acceptable.

Quantify the costs associated with downtime for each system or application. Sometimes, an outage means users are unable to do their jobs, reducing productivity. It can cost revenue if customers are forced (or annoyed enough) to take their business elsewhere, or if businesses fail to meet service level agreements. They must compare these costs to those of providing increased availability to see what makes the most sense for the organisation.

Building high availability into a system requires designing it so there are no single points of failure, to ensure resiliency. In addition, organisations must implement appropriate failover mechanisms and backup capabilities to support the availability requirements for each application.

Poor insight into what's happening won't consistently achieve good performance. Businesses that cannot fully manage an element within their system cannot maximise its value.

It pays to invest in scheduling tools, which help ensure that data warehouses and operational data stores remain up to date and accurate. Monitoring capabilities are also essential - businesses want to know about any potential bottlenecks or outages long before users call to complain.

Even systems that perfectly meet current needs will need some changes in the future, so the ability to manage change is key to the ongoing value of the system. Plan ahead and spell out the scope of a change and implement it in a rapid and predictable way. Success means that developers must have the tools they need to work effectively, and visual development tools are the easiest to manage.

The separation of transformation logic and physical execution eliminates any need to make modifications as a result of environment changes, freeing developers from a common chore. This is useful for migrating and deploying between environments or providing flexibility in heterogeneous environments so that processing can be done wherever hardware resources are available and without the need for manual intervention.

The biggest payoff of performance manageability becomes apparent at runtime. Manageability enables batch, on-demand and real-time data processing. Source and target system interaction can be fine-tuned and process requirements, such as profiling and cleansing, can be handled. Better manageability enables businesses to improve coordination between hardware resources to eliminate bottlenecks and other performance problems.

To get from "potential" to "actual" greater performance requires better throughput, scalability, availability and manageability than most businesses have built into their environments.

These four cornerstones must be considered at the outset and reconsidered frequently during the operating life of a system.

Organisations that focus on designing their systems to achieve all four will ultimately realise the benefits of greater performance for increased competitive advantage: cost savings, time savings and greater productivity.

* Mervyn Mooi is director at Knowledge Integration Dynamics.