As part of my role as a Specialist Services consultant at NexSys, I have to investigate performance issues reported by our SYSPRO Customers. As a result of this, I’m also tasked with identifying trends and feeding back my findings to our operations team, and occasionally on to SYSPRO for further investigation.
In the time that I have been doing this, I have come to find that a very high percentage of the performance issues reported have been subsequently down to one of the following areas:
Hardware
When a site replaces a key piece of hardware, such as a Switch, Server or Firewall, it’s always important that they trial new equipment with a selection of users before deploying it for everybody’s use. I have seen several instances where a faulty network card, server, switch or firewall has played havoc with the performance and reliability of SYSPRO.
Software
On many occasions I have seen the introduction of a key piece of security software be introduced, such as Managed Antivirus, Service Monitoring or a 3rd Party Firewall. And just as the hardware issues, this additional software has been deployed en-mass at the expense of the performance of SYSPRO, and unfortunately not been setup to omit SYSPRO’s or SQL’s working directories.
Configuration
Configuration is always one of the most overlooked things, and unfortunately this affects the performance of SYSPRO more than anything else. Often when a new server has been installed, is has been so with an abundance of new functionality ‘switched on’ in order to make it faster and more reliable. Unfortunately if the existing items on the network, such as Network Cards, Switches and Routers are not capable of utilising this ‘switched on’ functionality or technology, it can have the opposite effect and degrade the performance of SYSPRO.
Security
With businesses increasingly allowing their employees to BYOD (Bring your own device), more often than not, these businesses do so in a way which has little thought for the knock on effect on network performance. A couple of recent issues raised to me highlight this…
One site allowed up to 100 employees to use the main wireless network for personal data traffic, without any restriction – this caused a significant delay in SYSPRO processing times. A second incident reported, was that a single users none work issue mobile phone had been added to the wireless network, and the device unknowingly had ARP spoofing software installed onto it, which caused significant disconnects from the server because the SYSPRO servers IP/MAC address was being stolen from the server.
In order to obtain the best performance from SYSPRO:
- Speak to our support team about what omissions should be made from your third party software to ensure SYSPRO remains running at its optimum, ask for the SYSPRO Performance Document.
- When upgrading a key piece of hardware, ensure that it is configured optimally so that it works in unison with the other equipment, if you have any doubts, contact us for more information.
- If you are going to allow users to BYOD, then you should ensure they are only using a part of the Wireless network designed for just that, possibly on a subnet that does not cross over your main network used for SYSPRO. Even better, use tools to secure those devices.
