* How the Health and Human Services Dept. smoothed out app response times
Chris Finucane depends on a team of network experts and a handful of vendor tools to ensure some 82 field offices and 10 regional locations get the application response times they need to keep operations running smoothly.
Finucane, CTO of the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General in Washington, D.C., puts several vendor tools to work to optimize application performance over the WAN, tune applications on servers and then ensure devices don’t fail, respectively. His team – which included Infrastructure Architect Dave Agsten, Network Manager John Rogosky and Toby Kienle in infrastructure management – couples WAN optimization with application management and network analysis tools to keep systems running optimally and employee productivity high.
“Staffing is harder to get in government than technology so we rely on many different networking tools to monitor and fine-tune application performance,” Finucane says.
Among the tools are Riverbed’s Steelhead appliance and NetIQ’s AppManager software.
Riverbed entered the picture when Finucane realized a bandwidth upgrade wasn’t giving his organization the performance increase it needed For instance, increasing speeds from 64Kbps to 128Kbps, or even to T-1 lines, did not produce significant improvements in response times to the regional servers. Steelhead appliances sit between the router and the switch within a network and captures the data as it goes through to reduce latency-inducing conditions, such as chatty applications.
“The thing that caught my eye was the appliances work with TCP connections to suppress the chatty protocol within exchange and streamline the performance,” Finucane says.
As for application performance on local servers, NetIQ’s AppManager software helps the team determine when response time thresholds are missed and if for instance there is a memory leak from an application, he says.
“If our logs start filling up or reach a critical threshold, before the system hangs you’d have to manually reboot, but with NetIQ we have proactive rebooting,” Finucane explains.
