mySAP Toolbag for Performance Tuning and Stress Testing

15.2. Verifying Scalability—the Third Pillar

Beyond pure performance testing, or testing designed to prove your high-availability strategy works as expected, there is great value in validating the scalability of your Production environment (or a system configured to emulate it in a key way, like in terms of processing power or disk throughput). Scalability, the ability to address incremental workload needs or needs beyond what was originally envisioned, is at odds with cost. That is, a high level of scalability is easily achievable—it's easy to supersize your system—if you don't mind writing a big check for something you may rarely need. It's for this reason that I believe scalability testing is so vital. The concept is simple – it's better to ...