Key Performance Factors

Key performance factors are metrics that your technical representative uses as input to an automated sizing tool. The sizing tool calculates the estimated number of Gateway instances your Secure Remote Access deployment requires.

Identifying these key performance factors and giving them to your technical representative is the first step in formulating your baseline sizing figure.

These are the key performance factors:

• Session Characteristics

• Netlet Usage Characteristics

After you calculate these key performance factors, give the figures to your technical representative. Ask that the Gateway sizing tool be run to identify the estimated number of Gateway instances.

Session Characteristics

The session characteristics of the Gateway include:

• Total number of Secure Remote Access (Gateway) users

  This represents the size of your user base or pool of potential users for the secure portal..

• Expected percentage of total users using the Gateway (at maximum load)

  Apply a percentage to your total number of users to determine this figure.

• Average time between page hits

  This is how often on average a user requests a page from the portal server.

• Session average time

  This determines how many logins per second that the Gateway must sustain for a given number of concurrent users.

Netlet Usage Characteristics

Consider the following Netlet characteristics of the Gateway, which can have a impact on calculating the number of Gateway instances:

• Netlet is enabled in the Portal Server administration console.

  If Netlet is enabled, the Gateway needs to determine whether the incoming traffic is Netlet traffic or Portal Server traffic. Disabling Netlet reduces this overhead since the Gateway assumes that all incoming traffic is either HTTP or HTTPS traffic. Disable Netlet only if you are sure you do not want to use any remote applications with Portal Server.

• Expected percentage of total users using Netlet

  Apply a percentage to your total number of users to determine this figure.

• Expected throughput

  Determine the expected throughput of your Gateway, expressed in kilobits per second (Kbps).

• Netlet Cipher (encryption) being used

  Choices include Native VM and Java software plugin ciphers.