Old guard, new beat: TP monitors avert gridlock by policing client/server traffic
It’s an IT manager’s biggest nightmare. On a dark and stormy night, a WAN link suddenly crashed, taking down the national client/server reservation system for a company that wishes to remain anonymous. Harried travel agents kept pounding transactions into the system, expecting it to come up. When it did, the system was immediately slammed by a barrage of pent-up traffic. Designed to handle hundreds of transactions per second, the system choked on thousands and it crashed once again.
This company’s harrowing experience illustrates a dirty little secret about client/server applications. When they’re spun across the enterprise, many can’t handle the high-transaction traffic or unpredictability of com-plex, production-level environments. Increasingly, some companies like the one above are turning to a tried-and-true mainframe approach to keep their new client/server …