IBM (www.ibm.com) is a well-known, worldwide creator, developer and manufacturer of the industry's most advanced information technologies, including computer systems, software, networking systems, storage devices and microelectronics. Worldwide network of IBM solutions and services professionals translates these advanced technologies into business value for our customers.

Working with one of the big corporate account, IBM sales office have been fighting with the reluctance to migrate to the DB/2 on AIX platform (Regatta series). The customer has been using MS SQL server on Intel platform for the centralized financial system, developed in-house, and has obviously overgrown the platform capacity. Customer was aware that existing platform would be unable to handle real-life load of five thousands simultaneous users and 200+ hundreds thousands of transactions per day, but delay the final decision waiting for the confirmation from vendor (inn from of experimental results), that proposed platform will be capable to handle above mentioned volume. Customer also insisted on independent evaluation, putting IBM Global Service out of the game.

It was clear that in order to convince the client, some functionality of the existing system should be ported to the new platform and same performance test executed on both versions. Unfortunately, technical documentation for the software was sparse and outdated. AQT has to rely on the senior consultants experience with financial systems (some of them has been working for 6 years for financial software development company) to isolate most representative functionality of the system, as well as corresponding database tables and business logic components. At the same time AQT engineers has enabled statistics on MS SQL server in order to develop load profile for future tests and design load scripts. It was impossible to port selected functionality to the new development environment (Websphere + DB/2) in the available time. Therefore, AQT run additional profiling tests on the original system. Gathered data let us understand how business logic components communicate with hardware platform and the server (e.g. average number of IO operations and/or database transactions each functionality will generate when evoked, etc.), so instead of replicating logic we will be able to replicate the load. In order to make sure that assumptions are OK, some functionality was ported on-to-one and results received on emulated and "true" operations were evaluated for consistency. When test model was ready, AQT has executed performance test on both platforms on various configurations, using various approaches to performance optimization. Collected information was enough to support customer's decision.