April 2004  
Case Study
 Cutting Edge vs. Business Requirements
By Scott Murphy

IT professionals can be tempted to recommend the latest and greatest technology at the first hint of a potential fit within the organization. Sometimes these cutting edge solutions immediately live up to their promise. Other times they create new issues and challenges that either dooms the implementation to failure or long periods of waiting for the next service pack.

The keys to avoiding these mistakes are:

  1. Clearly document, analyze and understand business requirements;
  2. Understand the organization’s and the project’s level of risk tolerance.

A good example of a business need that can have a range of solutions from leading edge to tried and true is high availability application servers. The servers often support key line business applications for a large percentage of users within an organization. Other times they supply a niche application to the organization that is highly valuable during peak use (once a week or month).

Some options are:

1.      Hardware load balancing switches to connect multiple application servers;

2.      Citrix XP Application Load Balancing Services;

3.      Windows 2003 Server Network Load Balancing;

4.      Round Robin DNS aliasing; or

5.      Manually load balance users across multiple servers.

 

Early in 2003, a client of Data Perceptions, Factor Gas Liquids Inc. (FGL), needed to add a new key line of business application to improve their productivity and streamline some business processes. FGL is a leading oil and gas commodity agent with users in the Calgary and Sarnia offices that needed to work together over a wide area network.

After careful evaluation of the application solutions available, FGL selected a solution from Entero Corporation called EnteroVision®. This was designed to work on a high-speed local area network (LAN), and would not function well over the slower wide area network. Data Perceptions worked with their management team to identify how the applications would need to function and reviewed the pros and cons of the various options FGL could use to access EnteroVision® from both offices with high reliability.

FGL liked the new Network Load Balancing feature of Windows 2003 Enterprise Server, but there were a couple of concerns. First, as Windows 2003 Server had just been released, EnteroVision® had not been tested on it. A second challenge was that the Network Load Balancing option would require a significant investment in Microsoft Client Access Licenses (CALs) for Windows 2003. The lower tech solution of manual load balancing on Windows 2000 Terminal Servers became the cheaper option.

Liz Lyle, IT Administrator at FGL, says, "We had a limited number of key users of EnteroVision®. Data Perceptions was able to train the users to manually select which application server they would use based on availability and performance."

FGL’s staff now have the option of using one of two Windows 2000 Terminal Servers to access EnteroVision®. This redundancy also gives Entero Corporation and Data Perceptions the flexibility to update the applications and servers without business interruption.

Since the conclusion of the FGL EnteroVision® project, Windows 2003 Enterprise Server’s Network Load Balancing feature has been tested by users and patched by Microsoft. Many applications have been tested and certified to work with Windows 2003 Server. This technology now represents a lower risk to organizations that need highly available application clusters and should be considered where there is a fit with the business requirements.

Scott Murphy is a Consultant at Data Perceptions. Scott helps companies select best available technologies to meet their business requirements.  Scott’s education, IT and business experience allow him to understand clients’ needs and translate them into solutions.