Summary
The client, Strate, is a licensed Central Securities Depository (CSD) for the electronic settlement of financial instruments in South Africa. Strate’s core purpose is to mitigate risk, bring efficiencies to the South African financial markets and improve its profile as an investment destination. Strate is aligned to international best practices and continually strives to ensure operational excellence and provide enhancements for the good of the Southern African financial markets.
Business Challenge
The client with a substantial IBM hardware installation was experiencing performance issues with their WebSphere Application Server on their AIX machine. The CPU incurred a high load, going above 90% CPU utilization (15% kernel + 75% user). The business was getting affected since the server was being used to churn out MIS reports and also run other applications for the financial and marketing functions. The client felt an urgent need to get a comprehensive analysis done to get to the root of the issue.
Project Highlights
The AIX auditor, an in house product from C Ahead, is a script based tool that can be run on any AIX box. This tool identifies vulnerabilities across 200 odd parameters on a AIX box and rates the risk exposure of that particular environment. After running the scripts provided by the tool during peak and non-peak hours, our team analysed the results and identified 3 main causes that were responsible for this problem. Finally the MIS application was fine tuned and also the hardware configuration upgraded to handle high load conditions. The memory configurations as suggested by the analysis also yielded good performance results. The client’s IT team was trained on the use of the AIX Auditor to handle it with all its options.
Benefits
- Less downtime, so higher throughput on the user side
- Simple to use and Better control on application management allows good returns
- No need to change to the next hardware version hence cost reductions
- Achieving more with the same
- Single tool can help with identifying lots of issues thereby lowering the TCO
Learnings – Key lessons were
- Detailed end user meetings can result in faster issue resolutions
- Manage the SLA process properly to avoid complexities
- Suggestions for better IT management processes shared with customer are always appreciated