Larger Than Life

About Larger Than Life

Larger Than Life aims to support Israeli families facing pediatric cancer from diagnosis to recovery. They bring about a significant change in these families’ lives by creating joyful experiences while continuing to improve the quality of care and medical conditions for the children. Larger Than Life is proud to have helped more than 15,000 children and their families as they endure the hardships of pediatric cancer.

Every year, more than 500 Israeli children are diagnosed with cancer. Larger Than Life’s mission is based on three fundamentals: happiness, health, and hope, as explained by Alon Grinvald, Client Account Director with Larger Than Life: “It’s with these principles in mind that we have created over 20 different programs to support families in their brave and emotionally taxing fight. These donation-funded programs help them navigate the challenges that come with childhood cancer.”

Every year, Larger Than Life hosts a big fundraising event which is broadcast nationwide. The donations raised on this one evening fund the majority of all Larger Than Life activities, and is key to its success. Micro Focus became aware of the organization and this event some years ago. “We admire Larger Than Life’s great work and wanted to be sure of their success,” says Vicky Giavelli, Product Management Director for Micro Focus. “These large-scale fundraising events can put a huge strain on a small organization’s infrastructure. Our products enabled the Larger Than Life IT team to prepare so that their systems are up to the task and no donations will be lost.”

Micro Focus LoadRunner Cloud provides extremely scalable load and performance testing; just what the fundraiser needs. Since LoadRunner Cloud is fully cloud-based, it does not require any hardware or software installation. The Micro Focus team worked with Larger Than Life to stand up a working load testing environment within a couple of hours. In just a few more hours test scripts were created to simulate the Larger Than Life business processes. Following this preparation work, Micro Focus worked with Larger Than Life for about two months.

Alon Grinvald comments: “Based on our experience, our testing was aimed at up to 20,000 concurrent users and 2,000 transactions per minute. Micro Focus LoadRunner Cloud was used to perform initial load testing, and then dashboards gave full insight into the areas that we could improve or optimize within our infrastructure. After our optimization efforts Micro Focus LoadRunner Cloud tests were run again, and we repeated this process until we felt the system was ready for the big night.”

Thanks to the rigorous preparation and testing process the fundraising event ran smoothly. In total, over 20,000 transactions were successfully processed during the evening, giving the organization a fundraising boost of over $1 million to continue its great work for another year.

“We appreciate that LoadRunner Cloud supports our performance testing needs every year. It is fantastic that we can focus on organizing the fundraiser without any concerns that our systems might crash under the pressure on the night,” says Grinvald.

Vicky Giavelli concludes: “We feel honored that our technology and expertise is used in support of such a great cause. LoadRunner Cloud is perfectly suited to support this event, and we are delighted that the generous Israeli public has given Larger Than Life the funds to continue this important work.”