Large Scale CRM Customer Deployments & Scalability Benchmarks
The Myth of Fingerprints...
I've noticed that many large corporate and enterprise customers are starting to evaluate Microsoft CRM 3.0 with a view to deploying it at a divisional level. An extremely important part of the product evaluation process are the case studies of customers who have similar sized deployments with similar workloads. Earlier this year we published a press article here which provides details of several customer deployments in excess of 500 seats:
- H&R Block Inc. , a leading U.S. tax service provider, has a previous deployment of 1,500 seats of Microsoft CRM. It has added 500 additional seats for the launch of a new line of business and has a five-year plan to deploy 6,000 seats.
- AGFirst Farm Credit Bank, the premier agricultural lender in the eastern United States and Puerto Rico, is deploying 1,500 seats of Microsoft CRM.
- Chiesi Farmaceutici SpA, an Italian multinational pharmaceutical company, is deploying 500 seats of Microsoft CRM.
- Maccabi Healthcare Services, Israel’s fastest-growing health maintenance organization, now has 1,200 seats of Microsoft CRM
In addition to case studies, it is also important to have accurate server hardware sizing for project costing purpose, as well as benchmarking the performance of the system under a representative workload. To help with this task, we will soon be releasing a performance testing toolkit which you can use to accurately size and stress-test your CRM environment. In addition to the toolkit, we will also published a set of benchmark results for a test 2000-user system. This document is divided into several sections, each detailing a different aspect of the test:
- The hardware comprising the system under test.
- The workload represented by the test (dataset and activity mix), as well as the characteristics of the system under test while servicing the workload (response times, utilizations, etc.).
- Tunings required to achieve the characteristics revealed in the tests (indexing strategies, IIS/ASP.NET configurations, etc.).
I have uploaded an early copy of this document here
The toolkit itself will be available for use by partners and customers to provide a robust, customisable infrastructure to support sizing and scalability decisions, and establish key performance goals early in the project lifecycle. It is built using Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers, and if you don't have a copy, you can order a 180-day evaluation edition here and clicking "Try it Now" to start the order process.
Here is a link to an MSDN Webcast to help you get up to speed with Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers:
Feel the scalability goodness folks :-)
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.