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AS OF 7/4/2008 8:23PM EST
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July 24, 2007 —
If you’re like many organizations, you maintain at least two complete hardware and software systems—one for production and another for development.
Following this scenario, your company’s employees run their mission-critical applications from the production system, and your QA team deploys updates and changes first to the development system, where they can be fully tested. After that, working applications or patches are “thrown over the wall” to the IT operations team for deployment onto production systems.
"The same type of wall you hear about between developers and test and QA teams exists between test and IT operations, except that one is bigger and higher," said Jonah Paransky, vice president of marketing at StackSafe. The company, formerly Revive Systems, is currently beta-testing a virtualization-based software platform that Paransky claims can provide not only a sandbox for testing application updates and patches (a la VMWare et al.), but also analyzes the source of application failures, down to the component level.
According to Paransky, the software will provide IT and QA teams “specific info on what is broken,” including how the performance of the changed version compares with the currently running version, a list of known security vulnerabilities and Web issues, a “structure on smoke testing” for functionality and other reliability attributes he said it was too early to discuss in detail.
Why is this product important? “For teams that build custom apps in the enterprise or commercially, the traditional focus of testing has been on the program,” said Paransky. That’s in direct contrast with IT operations, whose primary job is to maximize uptime, he added. “IT operations responsible for 24/7 management of change of multi-tier applications see significant pressure to keep that application available.” Pressure comes not just from upper management, but also from users, who rely on the apps to do their jobs, and from development and test teams responsible for implementing changes.
“Once systems are running, they often stay running. It’s the changes that are usually the cause of downtime,” Paransky said. “We provide IT and QA teams with reports on the impact of changes before they put them into production in a way that’s easy for IT to install and use.” He claims that the company is addressing a hitherto untapped part of the market.
The StackSafe system works by copying the entire production stack—including the operating system, Web servers, databases and all applications—into a virtual environment included with the platform (Paransky declined to specify which one). “We’re not in the business of developing our own virtual technology, but we’ll include one to make it easy for IT to use. That means not forcing them to acquire and set up their virtual server.” He said that down the road, the company plans to permit the solution to be used with any number of available virtualization servers. “We’re designing it to be virtual-environment agnostic.”
Among the primary outputs, Paransky said, will be business impact of proposed new applications, patches or updates, configuration changes from an IT operations perspective and end-to-end performance analysis. Among the questions the solution will attempt to answer are “Does it have the functionality I expected?” and “What’s the risk of introduction—and should I certify the release?”
The product also is intended to isolate the DLL, middleware component or system causing a problem. “Which of the 16 vendor products involved in the multi-tier mix is the one that changed, and which one is causing the problem? What did the change do? Which DLL is not working? We provide not only the high-level report, but the low-level information to allow people to actually fix the problem.”
General availability is expected at the end of 2007.
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