1. Scaling Blackboard Learn™ for High Performance and Availability Stephen Feldman Sr. Director Performance, Security and Architecture

2. Quick Bio Blackboard since 2003 Performance Engineering from the start Platform Architecture in 2005 Security Engineering in 2010 “Love my job…love my team. If you email me, I will respond.” @seven_seconds http://goo.gl/Z4Rq5

3. A Quick History Lesson of Bb… First release was 6.0.11 launched within a few weeks of arriving. Technology shift from Perl to Java through Release 5 and Release 8. Blackboard was the largest PerlEx ISV in the world in 2003. Customers were having issues with optimizing Java, Oracle and SQL Server First benchmark was at Sun in 2004 called the Tunathon. Learned that Blackboard Learn could scale and could scale to high-levels with a little TLC.

4. As We Started Growing and Scaling In late 2004, we started building the Ref Arch as a model for customers Proved it out in benchmarks, as well as our own hosting facilities. We needed other players to come in and work with us to help us learn and validate a solution Key to our success: aggressive port from Perl to Java, earliest adoption of technologies: Solaris10, Oracle 10g, RHL 4 and 5, SQL 2005 and Java 5/6 Willingness to adopt virtualization very early on Willingness to open our technology stack for affordable solutions such as NFS and CIFS

6. Where We Are Today We have multiple customers supporting nearly 1 million users and dozens well over 250k live production users. Our benchmarks have been successful supporting over 1 million users with greater than 100k simultaneous sessions with sub-3s response times. The majority of our customers have benefitted from the Reference Architecture and have completely transformed their deployment to support the adoption and growth of the product.

8. In The Beginning: RefArch I

9. Focus of RefArch I Distribution of application and database Need for load-balancing the application server Early JVM clustering Fiber Storage and High-Speed Disks Low-cost option to use JBODs Basic operational monitoring Hardware, Network and Storage Database Keep it simple and you will succeed

11. A Few Years Later Came RefArch II

12. …Then Marketing Got their Hands on It

13. Focus of RefArch II

14. What are we modeling today and future…

15. Unified Approach Working Together No Longer Center, but Parallel…

16. Introducing RefArch III Logging and Monitoring Cloud Services Secure Performance Analytics Identity & Access Management Immunity Mobility Web Optimization Virtualization & Provisioning Data Management

17. Now Comes RefArchIII

19. Defining SLAs

20. Defining SLAs

21. What is Performance? Performance is quantifiable and measureable Performance is also perception Mostly recognized from a cognitive perspective Instantaneous Immediate Continuous Captive

22. What is Scalability?

23. What is Availability? High-availability offerings mask the effects of a system failure in order to minimize the impact of access and functional use of a system to a community of users. Simple Definition: Percentage of time the system is in its operational state. You will often hear the concept of 3x9’s, 4x9’s or even 5x9’s Planned versus Unplanned Availability = (Total Units of Time – Downtime) / Total Units of Time 8760 hours in a year Downtime = 10 hours Availability = (8760 – 10)/8760 = 99.88%

24. Quick View into Availability Statistics

26. Automated Provisioning Simple routine of provisioning systems Master processes and reduce human error Balance workloads Quick recovery Emphasis on efficient computing

27. Complete Monitoring and Logging Solutions

28. Application Lifecycle Management True application insight and visibility Business processing mapping to transaction SLAs Multi-layer correlation Transaction workflow mapping

29. Web Optimization Services Typical Optimization Services Compression Domain Sharding Minification Consolidation Inlining Asynchronous JavaScript Response Prediction Browser Caching

30. Present and Future of Caches Caches are used throughout Blackboard Learn to manage the life and reuse of data. Leveraging ehCache presently in Release 9.1 Caches can and should be controlled via the cache-settings.properties file Insight into the caches can be achieved in the Admin Console and other JMX tools. Next generation of caches: pluggable caches (use your own) and distributed caches

31. Steve Feldman @seven_seconds

32. Please provide feedback for this session by emailingBbWorldFeedback@blackboard.com. Scaling Blackboard Learn™ for High Performance and Delivery