| Amount invested: |
$100 million over several years |
| Organization: |
Financial organization |
| Original Plans: |
Develop a client/server workflow and imaging system to
front-end the mainframe. Create a Sun/Unix environment with >1000
workstations supported by >100 Sun servers running a popular RDBMS for Unix.
The investment decision was based on vendor promises of low cost, high
availability, and top performance. |
| Unanticipated problems: |
The new system and Unix application could not
support 100 users, with a response time of 120 seconds being quite common
with only 50 users online. With the required 100 users online this
frequently increased to 5 minutes and the system became unstable with
crashes and loss of data. The user replaced the initial HP Unix system with
one from Sequent but there was only a minimal improvement. The number of
support staff had doubled during the three years this project was being
attempted and the lack of systems management software had caused a number
of catastrophic failures with some data lost and never recovered. The true
cost of this has never been discovered but is certainly in the order of
$100m. |
| Project Status: |
The user decided to scale-back the application and move 80% of its
function back to the mainframe, effectively letting the application still do some image
retrieval. Plans for scaling back the application also called for the
replacement of workstations and GUIs with a thin-client device. |
