InformationWeek

August 30, 1999

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Server Boosters

IT managers meet a growing demand for better server performance with a variety of solutions

By Alan S. Horowitz

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eadhunter.net was being accessed by 45,000 users a day last October. By January, daily traffic was up to 80,000, and today it's 114,000. If Headhunter.net, a Web site that lists jobs and resumés, had done nothing to its servers, they likely would have failed to keep up with the escalating traffic. The Norcross, Ga., company needed more able-bodied servers, which is why it implemented a plan to boost server performance.

Headhunter.net isn't alone in dealing with underperforming servers. Tenent Healthsystem Corp., a chain of hospitals in Dallas, also needed to hike server performance when an acquisition suddenly increased the number of hospitals in the company from 90 to more than 120.

Moore Corp. Ltd., a printing company with U.S. headquarters in Lake Forest, Ill., faced the same problem when requests for order shipments went from monthly to as often as twice a day. "Orders are becoming smaller and more frequent, and the functionality behind the orders is getting more complex," says Bob Jones, the company's VP and CIO, explaining why he needed to boost server performance.

Changing technology is also a factor. John Enck, research director at Gartner Group, says the demand for better server performance is often a function of an increase in the number of users and an increase in the size of databases being used. Tom Henkel, a senior analyst at Gartner, cites the increasing complexity of applications as driving the need for more powerful servers.

And then there is the ubiquitous Internet. "The Internet is putting pressure on servers as more clients are hooked up," says James Gruener, managing director of Windows 2000 platforms at the Aberdeen Group.

Given the wide variety of factors driving the need for better server performance, it's no surprise that solutions are varied. There's no right or best way to get better performance, and that has IT managers continually wrestling with this problem.

J.C. Whitney Co., which sells aftermarket auto parts by catalog, boosted server performance by isolating servers based on functions, says Tom Murray, VP of IS at the Chicago company, which runs both Unix and Windows NT. Previously, a server ran two or more applications, such as E-mail and databases; now there's one application per server.

This follows the advice of Gartner's Henkel, who says, "Unix and NT are not good at handling mixed workloads like Web access and databases and big-batch files, so you might want a specialized server."

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