Case Study: University of Colorado achieves outage-free semester starts for 60,000 students with OpenText Silk Performer

Micro Focus Silk Performer ensures a smooth start to university for 60,000 new and continuing students each year

The University of Colorado system—serving four campuses and thousands of students—needed to ensure immediate, reliable access to student portals and administrative applications for roughly 60,000 new and returning students at semester start. A prior semester launch caused a major outage when the Storage Area Network overloaded despite passing functional tests, exposing the need for more robust performance and load testing.

The IT and QA teams implemented Micro Focus Silk Performer to simulate up to 60,000 concurrent users, run weekly automated load and regression tests, and model different network conditions; staff received targeted training to build efficient, maintainable scripts. Since deployment there have been no major load-related outages, teams gain earlier detection of issues through clear performance reports, and user feedback and application availability have significantly improved.

University of Colorado

Sasi Sunkari

Senior QA Engineer