Reducing time and CapEx in performance tuning, testing and capacity planning

We needed to answer questions on the capacity or footprint required to support more than 1000 concurrent users of our client portal website. The question was "how can this be done with mimimal capex, the lowest cost of performance test resources and minimal time?". To solve the problem, I organized a group of services including performance testing service using HP LoadRunner and the Hyperformix discrete simulation capacity planning tool. The services included a bundling of the LoadRunner licenses, the use of existing injectors and controller over the Internet and a process of gathering the data to ensure that we had what we needed for the capacity model. In a very short period of time, we had completed a Deep Diagnostic run of the application and could see the call tree with costs associated with each step. We found that there were performance bottlenecks in the application code that were removed to optimize the data for the capacity model and then built the capacity model. It was fast, efficient and we got the answers we needed in a month. Let me know if you would like to discuss this.