Microsoft Business Applications Improve Performance with ...



Overview

Country or Region: United States

Industry: Software

Customer Profile

Microsoft Corporation is the world’s largest software company, with subsidiaries in 94 countries and regions, and U.S.$36.84 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2004.

Business Situation

At Microsoft, internal business applications are reaching the threshold of what a 32-bit system can efficiently process, making the advantages of the Microsoft® Windows ServerTM 2003 64-bit platform increasingly attractive.

Solution

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions provided internal business and Web applications with a high-performance 64-bit platform plus compatibility with and improved performance of 32-bit applications.

Benefits

■ Increased productivity

■ Improved application performance

■ Greater scalability

■ Cost savings

| | |“Technology leadership is about driving business intelligence solutions that can scale. …our business relies on the power and performance only x64 can deliver.”

Max Giolitti, Director of Quantitative Analysis, Worldwide Licensing and Pricing, Microsoft Corporation

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| | | |As Microsoft’s internal business applications continue to grow in scale and complexity, the |

| | | |advantages of the 64-bit platform are becoming increasingly attractive. With application performance |

| | | |on 32-bit systems limited by a 4-gigabyte (GB) memory barrier, Microsoft is migrating some |

| | | |memory-intensive applications to Microsoft® Windows ServerTM 2003 x64 Editions to take advantage of a|

| | | |high-performance 64-bit platform, as well as improve performance with existing 32-bit applications. |

| | | |By transitioning to the 64-bit platform, internal business applications are benefiting from improved |

| | | |functionality and performance, infrastructure consolidation, increased scalability, and simplified |

| | | |upgrading. |

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| | | |[pic] |

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Situation

As the industry standard for the past decade, 32-bit systems were built on the premise that a computer’s operating system and applications did not need more than 4 gigabytes (GB) of memory. Over time, however, the need for operating system memory at Microsoft has increased as its internal business and Web applications have grown in complexity. Some of Microsoft’s applications drive terabyte-sized databases that support hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users. As many of these applications reach the threshold of what current systems can efficiently process, development teams are required to devise workarounds to avoid availability issues, out-of-memory errors, and other related problems.

As the 32-bit applications are scaled up to meet increasingly demanding workloads, the 4-GB memory ceiling became more confining, and careful planning and additional coding is required by Microsoft development teams to allow the applications to scale around memory limitations. The teams are often required to design and construct time-consuming workarounds to address availability issues on memory-intensive applications.

With applications that are processing extremely high workloads, the memory ceiling of 32-bit architecture can constrain computing power and inhibit processing, which may cause large processes that are improperly coded to fail. The 32-bit editions of Microsoft® Windows ServerTM 2003 operating system, part of Microsoft Windows Server SystemTM integrated server software, use a flat, 32-bit virtual address space that can be addressed to 4 GB, with 2 GB directly addressable by an application and 2 GB that are only addressable by the operating system. This divided memory is shared across all processes, further limiting the available virtual memory space that can be directly addressed by any one process.

Because 32-bit computing may not allow certain processes to access adequate amounts of RAM, data is typically cached to the hard drive, which can potentially overload the input/output (I/O) subsystem and may cause a performance bottleneck. Workloads that are computationally or memory intensive, such as large databases, technical computing, Web services, and enterprise business applications are particularly affected by this memory limitation. These intensive workloads demand an architecture that can store and process large amounts of data in memory.

A 64-bit system offers the advantages that the most complex internal applications at Microsoft required. However, internal departments at Microsoft were concerned about upgrading because, in the past, 64-bit hardware could not efficiently support 32-bit software. Upgrading meant an all-or-nothing approach and would have required Microsoft to completely redesign all 32-bit internal applications before transitioning to the 64-bit hardware. With the release of Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions and the availability of 64-bit hardware that supports 32-bit software with high performance, however, those previous concerns were eliminated. The time was right for Microsoft to begin its transition to the 64-bit platform.

Solution

To address the difficulties associated with a memory ceiling of 4 GB, Microsoft decided to transition its most demanding applications to Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions. The 64-bit operating system eliminated the 4-GB memory limitations, eased the burden on developers, and improved application performance. In addition, 32-bit applications that were memory bound got an immediate performance benefit on the 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003. The 64-bit architecture provided the 32-bit applications with the full 4 GB of virtual memory address space supported by the 32-bit architecture.

The transition began with workloads that were either computationally or memory intensive and would benefit the most from a 64-bit environment. Therefore, , MSN® Messenger Service, SAP, and the Worldwide Licensing and Pricing (WWLP) organization were some of the first to be transitioned to 64-bit computing.



Microsoft’s corporate Web site is the fourth largest Web site on the Internet. consists of 80 unique sites, involves over 1,000 databases, and supports thousands of Web applications. The site averages 12 million unique users per day and 200 million unique users per month. These users average 100,000 connections per second and maintain an average of 300,000 concurrent connections. To support this level of traffic plus 50 million average downloads per day, the site provides a bandwidth of over 20 GB per second. To maintain this service level, the workload is distributed over 950 servers located in three data centers. The site infrastructure is supported by 20 system engineers, 12 database administrators, and 16 tier-one support personnel who are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In the past, the support team needed to spend time working around 32-bit memory addressing limitations that affected Internet Information Services (IIS) version 6.0 as it scaled to this level. The site’s high I/O loads were severely constrained by the virtual address limit of 2 GB that caused IIS availability issues. It was running out of IIS virtual memory on the front-end Web host servers after 10 minutes of uptime under peak loads due to the coexistence of Active Server Pages (ASP) and Microsoft as well as heavy application caching. The team worked around the issue and maintained high IIS server availability by restarting the servers to recycle memory. With IIS 5.0, team members used a resource kit utility to incrementally restart each IIS server. After upgrading to IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003, the recycling functionality was included in IIS and allowed the servers to recycle memory without stopping. But in both cases, the memory pool was reduced due to the server recycling and led to performance issues for applications that cached to that memory. When a working process was restarted, any data currently in the cache was flushed and had to be retrieved from the disk again, causing slower response times and an increased load on the I/O subsystem. This resulted in sluggish performance for the application user and the possibility of frustrating application errors that required data to be resent.

The support team tried several alternatives to work around these limitations. For example, the team attempted to use the large memory aware switch to provide 3 GB of RAM for the application by reducing the amount available to the operating system to 1 GB. Unfortunately, this caused resource issues because of the smaller kernel memory pool sizes.

When the infrastructure was transitioned over to Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition, these memory limitations were eliminated. The team is currently running the 32-bit version of on Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition, and plans to complete the transition to a full 64-bit platform by the end of 2005, when the 64-bit version of 2.0 becomes available. This ongoing transition is simplified because the hardware can run either 32- or 64-bit software, which enables a phased migration from 32- to 64-bit software, with proper testing, while allowing immediate use of the 64-bit hardware. By using the 64-bit hardware, 32-bit processes under the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 get a full 4 GB of virtual memory that immediately improves IIS server reliability. In some cases the IIS server recycling stopped altogether. In others, the extra virtual memory provides the extra uptime needed for the team to track down the issues that may be causing the heavy recycling.

MSN Messenger Service

MSN® Messenger Service provides instant messaging as a free service for internet users around the world. The service facilitates 3.2 billion instant messages per day. “MSN Messenger provides the world’s largest community-based messaging system that interfaces with MSN Spaces, Hotmail®, and ,” says John Kenevey, Program Manager for MSN Messenger Service. “It’s a real time service allowing users to communicate instantly that provides reach to the MSN communities. A key feature of messaging is that it divulges the users presence information at the users discretion, in other words a user can let his buddies know if he is available, busy, or away from his computer.”

The 32-bit infrastructure requires hundreds of servers to support this demanding workload. The scalability and performance of each server is restricted by 32-bit system limitations, including the following:

• The software components are memory bound at the 4-GB limitation and reach the virtual memory limits before CPU utilization is at a maximum.

• Each server is limited to the 32-bit socket maximum of 80,000 simultaneous connections based on the amount of memory available to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) stack.

To improve scalability and performance and to promote interoperability between instant messaging services, the MSN Messenger Service infrastructure is being transitioned to a 64-bit platform using a standards-based protocol. By using the standards-based Session Initiated Protocol, the connections also benefit from the use of encryption to increase communications security. The new infrastructure is based on Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions to handle the increased load on the servers caused by the encryption and to provide better price-to-performance ratios.

To test the service’s performance in the lab, the product group ran comparable 32- and 64-bit systems side by side. The tests indicated the following:

• The 64-bit system processes the encrypted connections more effectively than its 32-bit counterpart due to improved integer arithmetic.

• Both systems were able to reach 62,000 simultaneous TCP connections, but the 64-bit system was better able to sustain the load. The 32-bit system was already intermittently hitting maximum processor usage at 25,000 users.

• The 64-bit system demonstrated consistently lower CPU usage than the 32-bit system. In theory, the 64-bit system could handle twice the load and still have additional CPU capacity.

• The 64-bit system handled 10 times the workload of the 32-bit system running as a presence server—the memory-bound component that constitutes about 250 of the 800 servers that support the system. This performance increase has the potential of reducing the server requirement from 250 to 25.

SAP

Supporting the core finance, supply chain, and human resources functions at Microsoft, SAP R/3 Enterprise version 4.7 provides the foundation for Microsoft’s Enterprise Resource Planning systems, including payroll, treasury, and other critical accounting applications as a three-tier environment. The R/3 support team manages a single third-tier database server running the beta edition of Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2005, part of Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server software, and nine connected second-tier application servers.

When the SAP applications outgrew the memory addressing capabilities of the 32-bit platforms, the support team experienced frequent out-of-memory errors when running large batch jobs on the second-tier application servers. This situation required the team to produce workarounds, which led to slow performance. As the SAP environment hardware reached the end of its life cycle, the support team also faced a 64-bit hardware upgrade dilemma. The team needed to transition the hardware to support the soon-to-be-released 64-bit SAP software that would solve these memory and performance issues. Unfortunately, the previously available 64-bit hardware would not support the current 32-bit SAP software to allow a phased migration, so the team was forced to wait. With the availability of 64-bit hardware that supports 32-bit software, as well as 64-bit versions of SAP R/3 and Windows Server 2003, the team was ready to begin upgrading.

|“The x64 advantage is about our ability to |

|hold large data sets completely in RAM.” |

|Quentin Hurd, Product Manager, Worldwide |

|Licensing and Pricing Tools and Analytics, |

|Microsoft Corporation |

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It was determined through testing that the new servers could handle approximately twice the old server workload. Starting with the four-year-old application servers, the support team is upgrading and consolidating the nine second-tier servers down to five. The remainder of the second-tier will be upgraded in 2006.

“The x64 platform provides us with the scalability and consolidation benefits that are a natural path from the industry-standard 32-bit systems of the past,” says Mike Hatch, Senior Technology Architect for the IT SAP team. “x64 gives us the perfect price/performance upgrade path that is the answer for Microsoft’s IT-SAP systems in the future”

Worldwide Licensing and Pricing Organization

The Microsoft WWLP organization is responsible for defining licensing and pricing strategies, monitoring their effects, and analyzing all volume-license sales made worldwide. The team actively manages multiple lines of business tools and analytical database applications used to empower executives, licensing specialists, and many other professionals in the field with the product price and licensing data that they need to prepare licensing agreements and customer-ready sales quotes for Microsoft enterprise customers. The information is also used by executives and analysts to forecast and to develop Microsoft’s enterprise pricing strategies. Due to the abundance of data and the desire to analyze all of it, the team rapidly moved their analytical assets toward x64 hardware. “Technology leadership is about driving business intelligence solutions that can scale,” says Max Giolitti, Director of Quantitative Analysis for WWLP. “With [U.S.]$15 billion in revenue annually and handling gigabytes of licensing, pricing, and sales data, our business relies on the power and performance only x64 can deliver.”

To analyze the intricacies of Microsoft’s worldwide product pricing to better understand the impact of issues such as worldwide pricing and currency fluctuations, as well as the discounting that occurs worldwide, the WWLP Tools and Analytics group created the Price Point Solution. The Price Point Solution was originally a Microsoft SQL Server 2005–based database application running on a 32-bit Windows Server 2003 platform. With nearly 20 million historic price points and 14 million line items from sales purchase orders, the database’s size grew to over 65 GB with the transaction data it extracted from the existing databases. There are so many historic price points that the price-point data table alone grew to over 8 GB.

One particular question that top business executives regularly ask is how many sales were made at each price point. This query takes nearly eight hours to complete with a dual 32-bit server loaded with 2 GB of RAM. Due to the length of time required to perform even the simplest queries, analysts were forced to wait hours or days for queries to execute. The performance issues were due to the following:

• The 4-GB RAM limitation required the hard disk to be continuously accessed.

• The disk read/write bandwidth was completely utilized and did not allow full CPU utilization.

To fix these performance issues, the Price Point Solution was moved to a 64-bit version of the beta edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 running on Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition. With an investment in 64-bit hardware and 32 GB of RAM, all of the price points and sales can now be held in memory, completely filling the entire RAM. As a result, the previous eight-hour query to tabulate sales at each price point now returns results in less than five minutes. “The x64 advantage is about our ability to hold large data sets completely in RAM,” says Quentin Hurd, Product Manager for WWLP Tools and Analytics group. “This means Microsoft makes key strategy decisions around the pricing and licensing much sooner, which significantly affects to our bottom line.”

Benefits

By transitioning to Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions, Microsoft enhanced productivity, performance, and scalability, and saved money.

Increased Productivity

The team behind benefited from a seamless upgrade to 64-bit computing. To transition its IIS servers to 64-bit hardware, the support team simply moved its 32-bit code over to servers based on Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition. Once configured with the code, the servers could be added to the existing server clusters as if they were 32-bit servers. There were no issues, and the functionality was transparent. The only noticeable difference using 64-bit hardware was a performance improvement. When the 64-bit 2.0 becomes available, the upgraded code will be added to the same servers, and IIS will be upgraded to the 64-bit version for a completely native 64-bit system. The support team also has the added comfort that they can convert back to the 32-bit software if anything were to go wrong during the transition.

The WWLP organization has also experienced productivity gains with its applications. Senior executives using the Price Point Solution have faster data access as a result of the 64-bit performance upgrade. This enables them to make timely decisions based on real data. Decisions that previously required multiple days to query the appropriate data can now be made in one day. In addition, by increasing the RAM to 32 GB, the entire source data sets fit into RAM, relieving the excessive load on the I/O subsystem and allowing full CPU utilization that substantially increases performance on query-execution time. Therefore, the Price Point Solution more efficiently provides visibility into real data and reveals developing trends and their instigators, enabling executives to make proactive decisions.

Improved Performance

The support team has enjoyed performance improvements on the 64-bit platform. By moving the existing code that was on 32-bit servers to servers running Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition, the support team was able to resolve its IIS availability issues. This is because IIS was able to take advantage of the full 4 GB of virtual memory address space supported by 32-bit architecture on the 64-bit system. Whereas the cache previously recycled every 10 minutes to free up memory, after moving to the 64-bit platform, the cache did not recycle for days or weeks. In some cases, it reached a plateau just above 3 GB of memory and never needed to be recycled. The extra 2-GB bandwidth also enabled easier analysis of memory allocation patterns to identify potential coding issues or inappropriate caching behaviors.

The upgrade of the SAP systems has resulted in improved response times. SAP batch jobs are running in half the time or better on the new 64-bit system while handling the load of two 32-bit servers. For example, a batch job that previously took 62 hours to run on a 32-bit system will now run in nine hours on the new 64-bit system. This particular job is an important example because it runs completely on the server and is not dependent on anything external such as a database server. Because the entire batch job can sit in memory, the I/O bottleneck is removed, allowing full CPU utilization. In addition, the 64-bit processor can process twice the instructions per clock cycle, giving it an extra boost during CPU-intensive computations.

Greater Scalability

Buying x64-based servers provided the SAP support team with a predetermined scalability road map. The x64-based servers allowed the team to run its current 32-bit SAP environment, while at the same time ensuring they will be ready to transition to a 64-bit SAP in the future. The support team was also able to use the improved performance to consolidate the workload of two 32-bit servers onto one 64-bit server, thereby saving money on hardware, software licensing, and data center charges. With the added memory addressing capabilities of the 64-bit servers, performance can be scaled to meet future workloads by increasing RAM to allow full CPU utilization. As the memory bottleneck is removed and future performance becomes dependent on the processing power of the CPU, the transition of x64-based chips toward dual core processors will provide an additional avenue for scalability.

The MSN Messenger Service support team has similarly enhanced their server scalability by moving to the 64-bit platform and has benefited from increased TCP connections. As MSN Messenger Service is an application that provides connectivity between its users, the number of simultaneous connections each server can provide is a factor in limiting scalability. Previously, each server was limited to the 32-bit socket maximum of 80,000 simultaneous connections based on the amount of memory available to the TCP stack. Any additional processes on that server using memory reduce this maximum in proportion to the memory they use. By moving to the 64-bit platform, the memory limitation was removed along with the maximum number of simultaneous connections. The 64-bit systems will now support more than 150,000 simultaneous connections with 6 GB of dedicated RAM before they become bound by the performance of the network interface card. When the support group compared the performance of the 32- and 64-bit systems, both were able to reach 62,000 simultaneous TCP connections, but the 32-bit system was unable to sustain the load. Even worse, the 32-bit system was already intermittently hitting maximum processor usage at 25,000 users. The 64-bit system demonstrated consistently lower CPU usage than the 32-bit system.

Cost Savings

The MSN Messenger Service development team is planning on a considerable amount of infrastructure consolidation while producing the next-generation, 64-bit, standards-based MSN Messenger Service. The 800 servers in the current infrastructure are expected to be safely reduced by 35 percent, with ample room for more consolidation. This translates directly into a 35 percent savings in hardware, software licensing, as well as ongoing data center costs while enhancing the service. The consolidation is made possible by the improved scalability provided by the 64-bit platform. For example, 64-bit presence servers handle 10 times the workload of 32-bit servers, potentially allowing the existing 250 32-bit servers to be replaced by 25 64-bit servers. In addition, 64-bit connection servers handle four times the workload of 32-bit servers, potentially allowing the existing 400 32-bit servers to be replaced by 100 64-bit servers. The consolidation potential of these two components alone would reduce the amount of servers required by 70 percent.

The SAP upgrade is showing a quick return on investment. The server consolidation is important to the SAP support group because the data center charges by the number of servers and the amount of rack space used. This is a regular monthly cost as long as there are servers sitting in the data center. By upgrading to 64-bit servers, the support group was able to run the equivalent of two 32-bit application servers on one 64-bit server, cutting the data center cost in half. These savings are significant and provide a quick return on the upgrade investment.

For example, according to Steve Bury, Senior Technologist for the IT SAP Basis Team, “The data center savings is $8,000 per year per consolidated server, and the new server costs $19,000. Therefore, by consolidating two 32-bit servers to one 64-bit server, the savings pay for the cost of the new server in a little over two years.”

Microsoft Windows Server System

Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server infrastructure software is designed to support end-to-end solutions built on the Windows Server operating system. Windows Server System creates an infrastructure based on integrated innovation, Microsoft's holistic approach to building products and solutions that are intrinsically designed to work together and interact seamlessly with other data and applications across your IT environment. This helps you reduce the costs of ongoing operations, deliver a more secure and reliable IT infrastructure, and drive valuable new capabilities for the future growth of your business.

For more information about Windows Server System, go to:

windowsserversystem

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| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Windows Server System

− Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise x64 Edition

− Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard x64 Edition

− Microsoft SQL Server 2005 |Microsoft Internet Information Services version 6.0

■ Technologies

− MSN Messenger Service | |

“With $15 billion in revenue annually, and handling gigabytes of licensing, pricing, and sales data, our business relies on the power and performance only x64 can deliver.”

Max Giolitti, Director of Quantitative Analysis, Worldwide Licensing and Pricing, Microsoft Corporation

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© 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, Hotmail, MSN, Windows, the Windows logo, 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 April 2005 | | |

For More Information

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"…[B]y consolidating two 32-bit servers to one 64-bit server, the savings pay for the cost of the new server in a little over two years.”

Steve Bury, Senior Technologist, IT SAP Basis Team, Microsoft Corporation

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“The x64 platform provides us with the scalability and consolidation benefits that are a natural path from the industry-standard 32-bit systems of the past.”

Mike Hatch, Senior Technology Architect, IT SAP, Microsoft Corporation

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