Steve Lysohir is a Perforce Administrator at National Instruments. Jeff Mery is the Systems Administrator at National Instruments.

Solution SummaryNational Instruments not only uses Perforce for software and hardware engineering activities, but also relies on the flexible SCM solution for a variety of applications in diverse departments such as IT operations, web development, documentation, language localization, customer education, and the sales/marketing departments. NI uses Perforce to store source code and digital assets such as binary files and Word documents.

Customer ProfileHeadquartered in Austin, Texas, National Instruments has more than 3,400 employees and direct operations in approximately 40 countries around the world. Leveraging the PC and its related technologies, National Instruments virtual instrumentation solutions increase productivity and lower costs through easy-to-integrate software, such as the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment, and modular hardware, such as PXI modules for data acquisition, instrument control, and machine vision.

The Challenge: Fragmented SCM and Storage InfrastructureThe company was using a number of different SCM platforms, including Microsoft Visual SourceSafe(VSS), ClearCase, and various open-source SCM solutions. As the company’s development requirements grew with six separate development facilities spread around the globe, the need to standardize on one cross-platform SCM system became evident.

Additionally, National Instruments had been using a variety of direct-attached storage (DAS) devices. As the organization’s data demands continued to grow, however, a better, more strategic storage solution

PERFORCE CUSTOMER

CASE STUDY

Development Environment at a Glance

Headquarters Austin, Texas

Industry Data acquisition and instrument control

Type of application Development of software and hardware products

Perforce customer since 1998

Client platforms Windows, UNIX, Linux and Mac clients

Server platforms Intel x86 servers running Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, and Linux

NetApp storage products used NetApp® FAS940c storage cluster

Number of users Approximately 1,000

Number of concurrent users 500 to 600 on the largest server; up to 100,000 total commands per day on the largest server

Number of development sites 6: Austin, Texas; Dallas, Texas; Mountain View, Calif.; India, China, and Germany

The Perforce Proxy Used in India, Germany, and Dallas, Texas offices

Languages used C/C++, Assembly, LabVIEW, and others (JAVA, PL/SQL, etc.)

Type of files stored in Perforce C/C++ and large binaries (JAVA, PL/SQL, Project Docs, etc.)

Number of files under source control More than 5 million

Perforce repository size More than 500 GB of files, 18 GB database

“We selected Perforce SCM based on four key factors: speed, ease of use, flexibility, and cost.”

- Steve Lysohir, Perforce Administrator, National Instruments

www.perforce.com

Copyright © 2007 Perforce Software Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks used herein are either trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.Please visit our website for more information: www.perforce.com.

was needed. “What we needed was a consolidated storage solution that could keep up with our growing SCM data requirements,” explained Jeff Mery, systems administrator for National Instruments.

The Solution: Standardize on Perforce and Network Appliance Clustered Storage Solutions“We selected Perforce SCM based on four key factors: speed, ease of use, flexibility, and cost,” explained Steve Lysohir, Perforce administrator at National Instruments. “At first, we used Perforce primarily for software development, but today we are using it as an enterprise-wide solution in a number of different departments. We are also starting to deploy the solution on the hardware side of our business.”

National Instruments not only uses Perforce for software and hardware engineering activities, but also relies on the flexible SCM solution for a variety of applications in diverse departments such as IT operations, web development, documentation, language localization, customer education, and the sales/marketing departments. NI uses Perforce to store source code and digital assets such as binary files and Word documents.

“Perforce is one of the most important software applications in use at National Instruments today,” emphasized Lysohir. This critical application required a highly flexible and robust storage platform. The company found that the flexibility and modularity of Network Appliance™ unified storage solutions offered the high performance and large capacity options that their geographically distributed product development environments required. National Instruments initially deployed clustered NetApp storage systems to support its Perforce environment and later upgraded to a NetApp fabric-attached storage (FAS) cluster. Today, 90 percent of all file serving throughout the entire company is handled by NetApp storage.

Business Benefits: An Easy Yet Powerful SolutionFlexibility and ease of use are very important considerations for the company. “With so many different groups relying daily on Perforce, we really appreciate the flexibility of the system,” continued Lysohir. “Each group typically has its own unique requirements and development methodologies. Because Perforce is flexible and easily customizable with scripts, it readily accommodates each group’s development style. The system’s open architecture has turned out to be a value for us.” As performance and capacity needs continue to grow, the National Instruments NetApp storage infrastructure can

be expanded independently of the computer infrastructure. New hardware can be implemented easily and quickly—and storage capacity can be expanded without downtime.

Equally important to the company are the power and performance of the Perforce SCM solution. “We have been very impressed with how well Perforce has been able to handle our extensive distributed and concurrent development environment,” continued Lysohir. “We calculate that we’re averaging about 100,000 commands per 24-hour period on our main server.”

In particular, National Instruments has been impressed by the product’s robust branching capabilities. “With Perforce’s powerful branching features, we can manage multiple software releases,” added Lysohir. “When we migrated to the high-performance NetApp FAS cluster, we decided to take another look at alternative storage solutions,” explained Mery. “We conducted a series of benchmark tests and were pleased to confirm that the NetApp systems outperformed all the other solutions we were looking at.”

National Instruments decision to integrate NetApp into its Perforce solutions has been very successful, not only from a performance standpoint, but also from a reliability standpoint. “The simple fact is, our NetApp systems rarely go down,” said Mery. “And that’s extremely important for a company such as ours. For example, the time right before a product release is a very critical time period. If we lose data at this crucial juncture, we might miss out on our market window altogether.”

And when it comes to service and support, Lysohir had this to say: “Perforce support has simply been excellent. They’ve been able to expertly handle anything and everything we’ve thrown at them.”

The Bottom LineTogether, Perforce and NetApp are assisting National Instruments in increasing performance and throughput, boosting development productivity, and reducing administrative overhead to the point that the company requires just a single SCM administrator. The net result for National Instruments has been the lowering of overall development costs coupled with accelerated time-to-market for the company’s virtual instrumentation solutions.

“With Perforce, our company has been able to improve our development process across the board,” concluded Mery. “And thanks to NetApp, we’ve been able to increase data reliability, availability, and scalability.”