We have patent applications working through the system and certainly want to see the technology reach commercial maturity and success.

But to get there requires an all-important step: Validation of the solution in an industry context.

We’ve done plenty of trials based on hypothetical scenarios run in our lab, and these have helped us refine the prototype and re-affirm our confidence that we’re onto something good here.  But what we need to move ahead is a real business scenario – an example business system with high performance characteristics and risks associated with failure of its component services.  Examples might come from a telco’s operations support system or business support system, integrated services within a banking environment or trading exchange, or other complex service environments.

Such an engagement would most likely involve as a first step us simulating the target system in our secure environment (or it could also be on our partner’s premises), at no cost and no risk, in order to ‘prove the concept’.  Assuming this were successful, the next step might be to plan for a production scale trial.  By the time we attain commercial maturity and success, we would of course expect our first validation customers to receive privileged terms for continued use of the technology.

But for now, it’s that first engagement that we’re chasing.  If this description does not sound like it matches needs within your organisation, perhaps you know someone for whom it does.  If so, spreading the word would be appreciated!

Thanks.

We call this the ‘meltdown scenario’.

With its nuclear catastrophe overtones this might sound overly dramatic, but if you’re the one who ‘owns’ the operational performance of this system and you’ve got senior management, angry customers, and the press all banging down your front door, then you might be just as comfortable trying to clean up Chernobyl.

In years past, outages of such services might have been an inconvenience affecting a minority of progressive, internet-savvy users.  But increasingly the importance of such systems staying up 24/7/365 is critical and outages are very bad news.  Literally: High-profile sites going down can make for embarrassing headlines.  Google has experienced this a few times in the last 12 months, with their Gmail service going offline without warning for hours at a time.

The senior business stakeholders for these systems have to rely on their IT operations people, who in turn have had to place trust in the architects, developers and testers of the original system.  These folks probably all would have done their best in good faith and with the highest degree of quality they could provide under their project constraints, when the system was designed, built and tested.  But, performance failures continue to occur and stakeholders continue to be nervous about new service deployments.  This is because the design and even testing of systems, especially the really complex ones, is still not an exact science.  It’s a combination of experience, gut-feel, conservative hardware over-provisioning, and occasionally a little bit of capacity planning and analysis.

In response to needs seen originally in the government sector, the team at NICTA has developed an approach that provides more rigour in the architecture, design and testing for large, complex systems.  We can model the system architecture and its components, then simulate the behaviour of the system when you subject it to normal or unusual patterns of load, eg., what happens if 1M users were to log on within a 1 hour period?  We can generally tell whether the system will withstand a certain load scenario and at what point it will reach breaking point.

Because this is such a well-recognised and important problem, our team have worked hard on refining this technology, to a point now where we have a good solution that has been validated a number of times in real-world field trials. Of course, we’re now looking for more customers with the types of challenges described.  But, we’d also like to know of other types of scenarios and examples where this technology might have been applied.  If you have any horror stories that sound like the meltdown scenario, please share them here!