Programmers Increase Gateway Performance Five-fold with ...



Overview

Country: United States

Industry: Travel Technology

Customer Profile

With its world headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, Worldspan is a global leader in travel technology services for travel suppliers, travel agencies, e-commerce sites, and corporations worldwide.

Business Situation

Operational costs for supporting the enterprise gateway were spiraling.

Solution

By using Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005, Worldspan developed and implemented a gateway that was more flexible, performed significantly better, and saved the company U.S.$1 million almost immediately.

Benefits

■ Improved performance

■ Reduced coding and administration

■ Reduced development effort 55 percent

■ Over $1 million in hardware and maintenance savings

| | |“… [B]y using the Visual Studio profiling tool and the Visual Studio Team System load tester, we were able to find some very quick performance wins—and we’re still finding them….”

Bill Sexton, IT Engineer, Worldspan

| |

| | | |Worldspan links more than 800 travel suppliers with customers worldwide. Traditionally, its customers|

| | | |connected to Worldspan’s mainframe through an enterprise gateway, but the gateway was not |

| | | |load-balanced and, therefore, difficult to scale effectively. As business grew rapidly, so did the |

| | | |need for additional concurrent connections, causing operational costs to spiral. To handle the |

| | | |increasing traffic and to control costs, Worldspan needed a better gateway. The company relied on |

| | | |Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 to design, develop, and implement a new enterprise gateway. When |

| | | |developers measured at the same stage in the lifecycle as the previous gateway, performance of the |

| | | |new gateway was five times better, with 55 percent less development effort, and with a projected |

| | | |savings of U.S.$1 million in retired hardware alone. |

| | | | |

| | | |[pic] |

| | | | |

Situation

Worldspan provides comprehensive electronic data services linking approximately 800 travel suppliers around the world to a global customer base. The company’s enterprise gateway sits between clients and Worldspan’s Transaction Processing Facility (TPF). The gateway plays a critical role in securing, routing, and processing transactions with speed and flexibility.

Worldspan’s mainframe gateway was difficult to scale, with the primary challenge being architectural. Specifically, Worldspan had a limit in the protocol: A certain session had to be tied to a specific gateway. As a result, the gateways were not in a load-balanced environment.

“We had to implement our own fail-over mechanism in case the primary gateway went down,” explains Nicole Hughes, IT Project Lead at Worldspan. “So we had backup gateways for every primary. But it wasn’t a good use of servers because backups were dormant; they were sitting there waiting in case the primaries went down.”

With business growing, but the number of connections on each gateway limited to 2,500, Worldspan had to add servers.

As the number of needed connections grew, Worldspan risked running out of IP addresses and faced spiraling maintenance costs.

Hughes says, “I estimate that, for a while, our traffic was growing by 20,000 sessions per month to our mainframe host, which is our back end to all of our gateways.” Every primary and backup machine had to have two IP addresses. When Worldspan reached 120 gateways, the company was using 480 IP addresses.

Hughes elaborates, “Our class C IP addresses were running low, but because we had all these dormant backups we weren’t justified in requesting the purchase of another class C.”

Lacking adequate load balancing and routing, the company incurred unwanted operational costs in underutilized CPUs, dormant backup servers, and IP addresses. The company needed a gateway that would handle client sessions in a more flexible manner.

Solution

Worldspan turned early to Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005, using this cutting-edge Microsoft development system to design, develop, and implement a new enterprise gateway.

The enterprise gateway concentrates a large number of client connections to a much smaller number of host connections and provides compression, encryption, and remote configuration. The gateway is a Microsoft .NET connection software rewrite of a current COM-based gateway to add the ability to load balance the gateways.

As shown in Figure 1, the gateway is load balanced. It sends client connections to the least-busy gateway within a farm of gateways that are part of the same virtual IP address.

Designing the Enterprise Gateway

In redesigning its gateway, Worldspan had the following goals:

■ Reliability. Because it is mission-critical to Worldspan and its clients, Worldspan wanted the new gateway to have uptime that matched or exceeded the previous gateway.

■ Resiliency. The gateway also had to be very resilient and not have any single point of failure. To help meet stringent resiliency requirements, the Worldspan gateway replicates configuration data to every company gateway, each of which is running Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE). Configuration data replicates from the main Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 Enterprise Edition cluster to every gateway. Should an outage in the main SQL Server cluster, it will not affect all of the gateways in the complex.

Says Bill Sexton, IT Engineer at Worldspan, “We’re using MSDE to replicate the database down to each gateway so that if the cluster has to be taken offline for maintenance, the gateways will automatically switch over to cache and start using cache so we can continue to operate even if the SQL cluster is down.”

■ Capacity and Scalability. Worldspan wanted each gateway to support 5,000 or more concurrent client connections—twice as many as the previous gateway. Hughes says, “By using thread pooling, we hope to be able to scale across multiple processors.”

The enterprise gateway connects clients to the host system. Clients connect to the gateway and request a specific host session. All traffic for that client and that host session flows through the gateway.

Developing the Gateway

Worldspan took advantage of Visual Studio 2005 tools and features to handle tasks including:

■ Server Configuration. The Microsoft .NET Framework, an integral component of the Microsoft Windows® operating system, made it simple to run on a range of multiple CPU servers for better performance without code changes.

■ Instrumentation. New performance monitor counters and event log support made it easier to instrument the gateway for Windows Management Interface (WMI).

■ Encryption. New support for salt values in session encryption providers simplified safeguarding the gateway from brute-force dictionary attacks.

■ Implementation Patterns. The Enterprise Library provided patterns for logging, exception handling, and database interfaces. The new provider model became the basis for Worldspan’s flexibility in handling multiple client and host protocols.

■ Load Testing and Profiling. Worldspan programmers created scripts in a fraction of the time and with four times the testing capacity of prior testing tools.

Benefits

In designing, developing, and implementing its new gateway by using cutting-edge Microsoft development tools and technologies, Worldspan has a gateway that exceeds its expectations and meets its clients’ needs. Worldspan developers are more productive. They reduced development time by 55 percent compared with development of the previous gateway. After all customer migrations are complete, Worldspan expects to save U.S.$1 million in retired hardware alone.

Improved Performance

By using Enterprise Library patterns for logging, exception handling, and database interfaces, Worldspan developers improved gateway performance five-fold compared to the previous gateway. Performance was measured at the same stage in the lifecycle.

Says Sexton, “When we started QA on the new gateway, we were able to support 350 users. But by using the Visual Studio profiling tool and the Visual Studio Team System load tester, we were able to find some very quick performance wins—and we’re still finding them—that are dramatically increasing the capacity of the gateway. It’s actual, measurable performance.”

By way of comparison, Hughes and Sexton describe the performance growth rate of the previous gateway:

“When the previous gateway first went into production, it could handle about 100 users. For us to get up to 2,500 users took at least a year,” says Sexton. Hughes adds, “Plus, it involved an entire week of testing at an Intel

|“…[U]sing Visual Studio Team System load |

|testing, we can generate the equivalent of |

|close to 1,600 users and can start the |

|testing process earlier.… That way we find |

|load problems sooner.” |

|Bill Sexton, IT Engineer, Worldspan |

lab. Compare that with the fact that, on the new enterprise gateway, we were able to do almost all of this ourselves, just using the tools that were provided with Visual Studio 2005.”

Reduced Coding and Administration

“All of the patterns and practices coming out of Microsoft have greatly eased the development of the gateway,” says Sexton. “We are simply reusing the Enterprise Library and the provider model. We didn’t have to come up with code or technologies to handle these concepts.”

Michael Engshun, IT Engineer at Worldspan, admits, “As with any new software, it takes some time to discover and learn the new features of Visual Studio 2005, but I really wish we had had it for our previous products! It would have saved us so much effort and convoluted programming.”

Worldspan IT Manager Shawn Tapley, Project Manager for the gateway project, initially had reservations about working with the beta release of Visual Studio 2005. “Working with beta code is challenging. We had to rewrite pieces of our code as the beta matured, but in the end, the time savings we gained from the new technology outweighed the time costs for us. I think we will continue to realize soft cost savings for years to come from having a more easily maintained code base written with Visual Studio 2005.”

Reduced Development Effort 55 Percent

Worldspan reduced development effort 55 percent compared with development of its previous gateway, which had used an earlier version of the Visual Studio development system, the Microsoft Visual C++ development tool, and COM-based coding.

Sexton and Hughes attribute the increase in developer productivity to the extensive features and capabilities of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005:

■ In the architecture samples — the availability of a provider architectural model. Worldspan also expects to save significantly on future maintenance, thanks to the provider model architecture. Remarks Hughes, “We’ll be able to go back and add things more easily as we need to modify.”

■ In the .NET Framework — the availability of thread pooling.

■ In the .NET managed code — its simplicity. There’s no interface management, no memory management, nor pointer manipulation, compared with native COM-based coding. Says Sexton, “That simplicity contributes greatly to increased productivity.”

Worldspan realized some of its biggest economies from using Enterprise Library for:

■ Configuration management

■ Exception management

■ Database connection and logging

“Enterprise Library has been a huge advantage for us because we originally developed the gateway using logging code blocks and exception management code blocks, and found that they were huge bottlenecks to our efficiency,” explains Hughes. “When we switched over to Enterprise Library, we saw a 70 percent increase in the efficiency of our application.”

Sexton elaborates on the efficiency increase, “That was on code we avoided having to write. The logging and exception management has been phenomenal. We’re using the logging part of the Enterprise Library to handle logging out of the Enterprise gateway and to do session traces. When we do session traces, we’re using the logging portion of the Enterprise Library to do that as well.”

Worldspan used Visual Studio Team System for load testing and not only reduced the unit testing period for developers, but also enabled them to identify and correct errors sooner, thereby saving time and avoiding bigger issues later. Previously, Worldspan used a Web client to generate hits against the gateways for load testing purposes.

“Doing load testing with our methods was terribly inefficient, says Sexton. “The most we could generate was the equivalent of 1,000 users using COM objects instantiated inside the browsers. But using Visual Studio Team System load testing, we can generate the equivalent of close to 1,600 users and can start the testing process earlier in the development process. That way, we find load problems sooner.”

Over U.S.$1 Million in Hardware and Maintenance Savings

Besides the U.S.$1 million Worldspan saves in retired hardware, the company expects to save significantly by avoiding maintenance costs. The company frees up 200 public IP addresses for use elsewhere in the company, and avoids having to purchase another class C IP address range.

Microsoft Windows Server System

Microsoft Windows Server System™ is a line of integrated and manageable server software designed to reduce the complexity and cost of IT. Windows Server System enables you to spend less time and budget on managing your systems so that you can focus your resources on other priorities for you and your business.

For more information about Windows Server System, go to:

windowsserversystem

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is the world's most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows solutions and Web applications and services. Improvements to Windows, Web, mobile, and Office-based development enable organizations to deliver a variety of modern solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the Visual Studio product line with new software lifecycle tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the software development lifecycle. With Visual Studio 2005, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.

For more information on Visual Studio 2005, go to:

msdn.vstudio

Acquire Visual Studio:

msdn.vstudio/howtobuy

-----------------------

| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

■ Microsoft Windows Server System

− Microsoft Windows Server"! 2003

− Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition

■ Technologies

− Microsoft

− Microsoft Data Engine

− Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ)

− |Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0

− Microsoft VServer System

− Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003

− Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition

− Technologies

− Microsoft

− Microsoft Data Engine

− Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ)

− |Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0

− Microsoft Visual C#®

− Microsoft Visual C++

− Enterprise Library

| |

[pic]

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Active Directory, Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual Studio, the Visual Studio logo, Windows, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published October 2005 | | |

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:

For more information about Worldspan products and services, call (770) 563-7400 or visit the Web site at:

“When we switched over to Enterprise Library, we saw a 70 percent increase in the efficiency of our application.”

Nicole Hughes, IT Project Lead, Worldspan

| |

Table 1. Fast Facts | |Transactions per day |200 million + | |Projected installed clients |570,000 | |Increase in developer productivity |55 percent compared with development of previous gateway | |Expected hardware savings |U.S.$1 million | |Visual Studio Team System load test savings |75 percent cheaper for 4 times the capacity | |Development environment |Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 | |Programming language |Microsoft Visual C# | |Number of developers |3 full-time, 8 part-time | |Time to develop |17 months | |Total project hours for previous gateway (not just development) |Approximately 44,000 | |Total project hours for new gateway (not just development) |Approximately 24,000 | |

“All of the patterns and practices coming out of Microsoft have greatly eased the development of the gateway. We are simply reusing the Enterprise Library and the provider model. We didn’t have to come up with code or technologies to handle these concepts.”

Bill Sexton, IT Engineer, Worldspan

| |

Figure 1. Enterprise gateway architecture.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download