At the Fun House: Experiences in Performance Tuning Oracle, Linux and z/VM for a Large ERP

Project and Program: Linux & VM, Linux

Tags: Proceedings , 2011 , SHARE in Orlando 2011

For the past 2 years, Marist College has embarked on an adventure.  First, moving from a CICS based ERP to one that is entirely based on open platform, Sungard's Banner.  If changing all of the college's business processes wasn't enough fun, Marist also became the first customer to do it entirely on Linux on System z.  In an effort to get the application supported by the vendor and to make it available for many other institutions on System z, we took an in-depth look at the applications performance on the platform.

After initial tuning of the virtual environment we dug deeper, working with IBM, Oracle and Mainline to form a task force to get the most performance out of the application we could muster.  The presentation will cover initial porting of the application to run on System z, load testing methodology and results spanning different hardware platforms, Linux versions, Oracle versions, virtualization, and changes we made to increase the performance of the vendor application.  Many of the results were very surprising, and broadly applicable.

Presenter(s): Brian Gormanly, Marist College

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