staff R&D engineer
Working in IBM’s China Research Lab, R&D engineer Sheng Lu lends his expertise to the company’s High Performance On Demand Solutions (HiPODS) team. Together with IBM Global Business Services, HiPODS works with clients to analyze traffic patterns and help improve the performance and availability of some of the world's largest Web sites. It’s no easy task – typically, these Web sites employ multi-tiered infrastructures with each tier handling a particular set of functions, including serving content, providing integration business logic, and processing database transactions.
Shortly after receiving his PhD from Nanjing’s Southeast University in 2004, Lu joined IBM, specializing in the area of network-based application performance diagnosis and in the development of service-delivery solutions.
"My focus area is network performance analysis," says Lu. "In any high-speed, large-scale network, compatibility issues among functions can negatively affect end-to-end performance, and optimal performance is critical to the clients we're assisting." Lu’s work concentrates on helping pinpoint, understand and correct those issues that prevent network performance improvement. As more and more companies depend on the Internet for Web-based activities and e-commerce, Lu's work becomes increasingly important. "By modeling network performance factors and developing useful tools, IBM is able to help clients provide better service to their own customers," says Lu.
Lu’s team also provides service-delivery solutions to data centers, helping these organizations accommodate high flows of traffic while managing their technological devices and responding to the needs of their customers.
In a recent engagement, Lu worked with consultants from IBM Global Business Services to analyze a GBS client's e-commerce IT operations and provide a solution for reducing bandwidth demand at the busiest times and improving Web site stability. The goal was to boost the client's Web site performance without having to upgrade its hardware or software. The HiPODS solution helped to streamline the Web site functions by refreshing only those parts of the pages that changed, rather than the whole page, and eliminating reproduction of white space where possible. The result has been faster page loading, improved customer experience and a dramatic reduction in Web server crashes.
Despite IBM’s leading edge in technological problem-solving, Lu believes that the company’s real strength lies in the old-fashioned relationships IBM develops with its clients: “By learning the requirements and pain points of each customer, IBM gains deeper insight into their business. After modeling performance factors and building useful tools, we help our clients provide better service to their customers.”
| |
