Case Study: Law School Admission Council (LSAC) achieves reliable peak-period performance and phased infrastructure upgrades with Fortra Vityl Capacity Management

Using Vityl Capacity Management to Implement Phased Infrastructure Upgrades at LSAC

The Law School Admission Council (LSAC), which supports law school applicants and more than 200 member schools with a network of T3 links and about 100 Windows servers, faced recurring performance bottlenecks during peak application deadlines (notably Feb 1 and 15). After slowdowns in 2007 and ahead of a phased roll‑out of its ACES2 application, LSAC needed to predict capacity requirements, isolate causes of degraded response times, and ensure it could meet informal SLAs as more schools came online.

LSAC implemented Vityl Capacity Management to model peak workloads and run what‑if scenarios during a 32‑school beta and a planned 12‑school/month rollout. The tool pinpointed root causes (e.g., SQL queue delays tied to disk I/O and memory spikes during backups), showed exactly what hardware changes were required, and verified that the phased roll‑out could be supported on the existing platform. As a result, LSAC eliminated bottlenecks, maintained acceptable response times through peak periods, and strengthened operations–development collaboration for ongoing capacity planning.

Law School Admission Council

Jeff Fox

Manager of Network Infrastructure Services