[June 05, 2012]

ExtraHop Networks Enables Successful NoSQL and Database Performance Optimization for World's Largest SaaS ERP Provider

ExtraHop Networks, the leading provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions, today announced that its solution has helped Concur Technologies, the leading provider of integrated travel and expense management services, to optimize the performance of more than one thousand databases and a memcache deployment with 52 million items. In 2010, Concur was the world's largest SaaS (News - Alert) ERP provider by total revenue according to Gartner.¹ With ExtraHop's agentless APM solution, Concur ensures that $50 billion in annual corporate expense reports don't fail in the cloud. ExtraHop helps Concur achieve these results by monitoring more than two billion SQL queries and 500 million memcache hits each day, identifying SQL workloads for NoSQL caching, and improving database query response times by as much as 1,000 percent.

"To support our mission of delivering continuous innovation that helps our clients drive down costs, we have to be able to serve a transaction tomorrow with fewer resources than today," says Drew Garner, Director of Architecture Services at Concur. "ExtraHop has given us the intelligence we need to continually increase efficiency and sustain a competitive advantage."

Seeking greater scalability, efficiency, and speed, Concur sought to replace its homegrown caching system with an open-source NoSQL memcache solution. To identify the best candidate applications for migration to memcache, Concur used the ExtraHop system to analyze billions of SQL queries each day across more than one thousand databases and passively monitor memcache transactions without impacting performance.

"Usually, people monitor memcache with server-side and client-side metrics, but there is a lot of activity in the middle that is cucial. With ExtraHop, we can monitor our memcache implementation from end to end," adds Garner. In one case, the R&D Operations team used the ExtraHop system to find specific memcache keys that were not stored because they exceeded the default 1MB limit. "ExtraHop is the only product that could detect the problem and find the offending keys," says Garner.

ExtraHop's unique network-based APM (News - Alert) solution also proved to be the only solution capable of enabling Concur to truly understand and optimize the performance of its databases. "Our DBAs could either run a trace on each database, which would be like shining a spotlight on a small section of a highway, or they could use the ExtraHop application performance management solution, which is like lighting the entire highway," says Garner. "In many cases, the alternative to using the ExtraHop system is so time-consuming and laborious as to be impractical. But ExtraHop empowers our lean staff to manage a growing infrastructure that includes thousands of databases and an expanding memcache deployment."

"Many companies cannot run traditional database profilers continuously in production because of the overhead involved," says Jesse Rothstein, ExtraHop CEO and co-founder. "Concur faced this challenge, and ExtraHop offered the ideal solution. The ExtraHop system is the first and only application performance management solution to provide deep visibility at massive scale without adding any overhead to networks or systems. Leading companies including Concur are using ExtraHop to monitor their applications and IT infrastructure in a way that was not previously possible. These organizations are quickly optimizing their applications and outperforming the competition."

For more information on the key benefits that Concur has realized from using the ExtraHop system, read the full case study or view the accompanying infographic. To learn more about how the ExtraHop system's unique network-based approach provides unparalleled database performance monitoring, visit http://www.extrahop.com/solutions/by-technology/database/.

Tags: Database, NoSQL, APM, Application Performance Management, memcache, SQL, SaaS, ERP, Concur, ExtraHop

About ExtraHop Networks (News - Alert)

ExtraHop Networks is the leading provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions. The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system performs the fastest and deepest analysis in the industry, achieving real-time transaction monitoring at speeds up to a sustained 10Gbps in a single appliance and application-level visibility with no agents, configuration, or overhead. The ExtraHop system quickly auto-discovers and auto-classifies applications and devices, delivering immediate value out of the box. ExtraHop Networks provides award-winning solutions to companies across a wide range of industries, including ecommerce, communications, and financial services. The privately held company was founded in 2007 by Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji, engineering veterans from F5 Networks and architects of the BIG-IP v9 product. Follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) @ExtraHop. For more information, visit www.extrahop.com.

¹ Gartner (News - Alert) Research, "Market Share Analysis: ERP Software, Worldwide, 2010," April 2011.

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