Yet even as IT organizations are spending up to $100,000 a pop on these boxes, few have any idea how well they're working. These high-octane accelerators are like Formula One racecars without a speedometer - the pedal is to the metal, but is it fast enough? Racing without a speedometer might be fine on an empty test track, but as enterprises deploy increasingly complicated and crowded Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) with hundreds or even thousands of Web Services, not knowing the speed you have to spare can be a prelude to an ugly crash.
Fortunately, there are ways to measure performance, ranging from using separate monitoring appliances to several vendors' plans to build speedometer technology directly into the accelerators.
This article will discuss the actual impact of acceleration on network and application problems in Service Oriented Architectures using real-world examples, and compare and contrast the efficacy and efficiency of the various speedometers available.
