Komtek’s Experience with lookdirect

Background

For 30 years, Komtek has been developing and supporting System i based solutions for Government utilities. Their 5250 application was modernized to support a high performance, browser-based, modern user interface which has been successfully deployed and well received by their customers. By enabling lookdirect, Komtek found transaction throughput could be increased 8-fold on their own System i, ensuring Komtek's modernization efforts could deliver their existing and prospective customers significant reductions in System i hardware costs.

Solution

The test machine was Komtek’s System i Model 520, with 600 total CPW and 30 interactive CPW running their County Government solution. A 5250 based inquiry which scanned 40,000 customer records and displayed the results in a subfile, was selected to create a very heavy interactive processing requirement. Without lookdirect enabled, the 520 was incrementally loaded with the processing intensive customer inquiry workload until the response times degraded from 2 to 5 seconds then to 10 seconds, indicating the 30 interactive CPW threshold was exceeded.

Benefits

When lookdirect was enabled, the same workload was attempted and the user response time was consistent at 2 seconds – there was no response time degradation as the total 600 CPW was now available to support the modernized 5250 application. The improved performance meant transaction throughput increased around 8-fold while excess capacity remained available to support many more 5250 users.

These tests confirmed previous customer validation exercises which showed lookdirect could support approximately 10 times the workload for similarly configured System i Models.