Scalability requirements

An important aspect of planning the implementation and configuration of your Sterling™ Order Management System Software system for production is determining your workload and business processing characteristics, and your performance requirements.

This includes (at a minimum) the following:

• Identifying the key or high transaction volume use case scenarios - for example, in retail environments, you may have an order capture, order returns, order modification and order authorization use case scenarios. For each use case scenario, you should determine:
  • The workloads (both custom-developed and IBM®-supplied) that are carried out
  • The forecasted peak transaction volumes
  • When the peak processing periods occur during the year
  • The external systems the Sterling Order Management System Software system is integrated with

When choosing use case scenarios, you should include:

• Workloads with anticipated high transaction volumes
• Workloads that are complex (for example, orders with large number of order lines)
• Workloads/transactions that have to traverse long network distances (for example, user and data center in different continents)
• High volume transactions that are integrated with external systems

For each use case scenario, you should:

• Perform load testing to at least the anticipated peak workload volumes.
• Measure the computing resource cost at different workload traffic volumes.
• Estimate the computing cost per unit work.
• Identify and tune expensive workloads - This could include ensuring all SQL are supported by appropriate indexes (Custom indexes), custom code, and so forth.
• Incorporate the cost per unit work into a resource capacity forecasting or planning model.
• Project out the resource requirements for the peak periods.

If you have remote users, you have to test use case scenarios that involve screens or network based transactions across a real or simulated wide-area network. These include:

• The use of the Sterling Order Management System Software screens (for example, to enter or modify orders)
• RF transactions

The answers to the questions above are critical to how you configure Sterling Order Management System Software.

System test

We strongly advise that you schedule time and resources to test Sterling Order Management System Software system (including all custom code, integrated external systems, and so forth) prior to implementation. IBM tests Sterling Order Management System Software to common or general usage patterns. Your configuration may differ greatly:

• Custom code - Need to ensure your custom code scales and does not have longevity issues. These are issues that show up after running the system for many days - for example, memory or connection leaks.
• Integration to external systems - Need to ensure that external systems can scale along with Sterling Order Management System Software. In the right conditions, slow external systems could tie up the Sterling Order Management System Software resource and could lead to a system slow down.
• Configuration - Need to test the Sterling Order Management System Software system with representative data. For example, your configuration may have much larger catalogs and ship nodes than most customers.
• User locations - Need to ensure users get responsive service. For example, you may have large customer groups located in a different continent from Sterling Order Management System Software. You may also have customers who dial in to access Sterling Order Management System Software. You need to ensure that all users get appropriate screen response times.