Company: Covis Software
Application: CRM software-as-a-service provider
Server configuration: 6-server farm
Reason for deployment: Needed to increase high availability without sacrificing speed and scalability in web server farms
Results: Covis Software achieved the performance and scalability that its customers require
Background
Covis Software, a full-service CRM software as-a-service provider, is an emergent leader in Germany and beyond. It hosts a dedicated CRM system for a large European logistics firm, which requires it to deliver high availability, high performance, and scalability for over 3,000 concurrent users. It used ASP.NET Session State Service to store application session-state and Microsoft SQL Server to make objects accessible to applications across the server farm prior to adopting ScaleOut StateServer®.
Challenges
ASP.NET Session State Service provided fast, in-memory storage, but it proved inadequate when users were bounced between multiple application server nodes during sessions. Each server hosted session state in its own cache, and the standalone caches created performance bottlenecks. The server farm required load balancing.
Moreover, ASP.NET Session State Service was a single point of failure. If the host it ran on went offline, no state information was available for any user on any of the servers in the farm. Another bottleneck occurred when business objects were stored in SQL Server, further diluting the performance of the CRM suites. The maximum supported concurrent users were around 500, inhibiting its ability to support large enterprises as clients.
Results
“ScaleOut StateServer functionality/performance is far better than SQL was.”
–Kristof Berger, Chief Software Architect
Covis Software chose to deploy ScaleOut StateServer as a highly available cache for its mission critical applications, and can now handle customers of all sizes. ScaleOut StateServer is used to store session state and to cache business and data objects.
“We cache anything that is being used with high frequency inside of the application,” said Chief Software Architect Kristof Berger. “Many users may access the same window within a small time frame instead of retrieving data from a database or external systems.”
“The performance improvement is measurable in HP LoadRunner,” Berger said. “There was nearly linear scalability – no negative aspects.”
Deployment Details
ScaleOut StateServer was deployed into a dedicated test bed, and was evaluated over a four-week period. Integration and performance tests were performed at a low level.
Basic applications were used to stress test ScaleOut StateServer’s performance capacity, Berger noted.
About Covis Software
Dr. Glinz COVIS GmbH develops CRM suites on the German market. It acts as a full-service provider, handling all of the necessary definition requirements and engineering requirements for a project. It develops applications on top of a proprietary .NET application framework, and hosts the applications in its own datacenter.