Media Monitors upgrade infrastructure

Media Monitors, an Asia-Pacific media intelligence company, provides more than 4000 clients with the media intelligence to enable effective communications. Its suite of products provides the tools and insight for PR and communications professionals to monitor their interests across all media, analyse the brand or message and more effectively connect with relevant journalists and editors.

According to Joe De Battista, the company’s Chief Information Officer, Media Monitors was implementing an upgraded clustered server and network infrastructure for its premium online products Mediaportal and SLICE. Prior to contacting Matrium Technologies, Media Monitors completed its own functional user acceptance testing.

“We attempted to use internal staff to perform load testing and were unable to obtain a realistic load due to logistics and staff availability. The plan was to get 100 users on the system, from which we would extrapolate performance to higher loads. Even though on paper the new server was a higher specification than the existing server, the actual performance was dependent on a number of factors, the most important of which was the SQL database which we were migrating from MS SQL 2000 to MS SQL 2008. This significant change warranted as real as possible performance and load testing. When we realised that using actual users was not going to be practical, simulated load testing seemed to be our only option. However, we had no experience with doing this so we needed a partner to assist.”

Therefore, Media Monitors contacted a number of its existing third-party partners seeking any experience with simulated load testing, and Macquarie Telecom recommended Matrium Technologies, as it had used Matrium’s services previously.

Matrium Technologies has extensive experience in professional services and a diverse range of testing methodologies at its disposal. Therefore, after assessing the challenges facing Media Monitors, Matrium Technologies decided that Spirent’s Avalanche was the most appropriate product for the job, due to Avalanche being able to emulate high volumes of realistic traffic that would thoroughly exercise Media Monitors’ network.

An important outcome for Media Monitors was that its customers did not experience any downtime when moving to the new server. Matrium Technologies was flexible and knew that Media Monitors had a deadline for the launch of its new platform, which Matrium understood and was only to happy to abide by.

After the initial consultation, Matrium Technologies scripted a tailored test and set up the Spirent Avalanche at the Media Monitors hosting site, where on-site load testing and analysis of the Mediaportal was performed. Testing took place over several days, and allowed Media Monitors staff to observe how their new network and server infrastructure performed under various load stress conditions.

The complexity of the application and the number of features offered by Media Monitors proved to be a welcome challenge for the professional services team.

The findings were then reported to Media Monitors in a quick and timely manner. Matrium Technologies proved conclusively that the new network and server infrastructure was capable of handling the current network load and could withstand an increase in users of 350%.

This gave Media Monitors the confidence to know that its network and server infrastructure is capable of handling its expected forecasted growth and to ensure that it can continue to provide the most timely, reliable and relevant service in the media intelligence industry.