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Stoke City Council is
no exception. The Council has standardized
on Sun Solaris as its platform of choice,
although a number of more specialized
applications run under Windows NT or remain
on the original ICL VME mainframes.
The Council had
invested in a highly specialized document
imaging system for the benefits office.
Any correspondence or documentation relating
to benefits claims could be scanned into
the new Sun Solaris-based ‘jukebox’
optical system and stored electronically
in an Oracle database. Letters could be
output automatically in Word format. The
system was also linked to the Council’s
ICL VME mainframe which calculated the
benefits due. The process of inputting
historical data into the new system was
lengthy but the system was able to go live,
on a limited basis, in early 2000 with
some sixty members of staff using it. On
commissioning, the system ran increasingly
slowly. |
Consultants
from Capacity Planning specialists, Metron,
were commissioned to carry out a study
to identify the cause(s) of the problem.
Using Metron’s Athene performance
management tool, data was collected relating
to the network, CPU, disk utilization
and contention for memory resources.
The report identified seventeen different
actions which needed to be taken to improve
the performance of the system.
Within three to
four weeks, users were noticing huge
improvements to the system. The backlog
of claims began to drop. As expected
the first and least expensive of the
recommended actions produced the most
dramatic results with a reduction in
disk utilization from over 50% to around
6%. Adding indexes to the most frequently
accessed Oracle tables reduced Oracle’s
CPU usage by more than 50% and reduced
the I/O generated by Oracle by 90%.
Metron’s Athene software is now used
regularly by the Council’s IT department
to monitor both Unix and NT systems, and
as a means of evaluating all competing,
short-listed new applications before a
decision to purchase is made.
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