External Infrastructure Connectivity Is Here

Posted June 2nd, 2008 by Joe Pendry

IT’s About Uptime focuses on IT operations trends and issues but, from time to time, we feel that it is important to blog about what is going on with StackSafe and our products. Especially when we make an announcement that addresses the problems that IT operations professionals deal with every day.

In that light, today’s blog focuses on StackSafe’s introduction of a new feature that we call “external infrastructure connectivity”. As Dan “The Virtual Man” Kusnetzky mentions in his post about the announcement, this new feature expands the capabilities of our flagship product, StackSafe Test Center. His post does quite a nice job summarizing the feature and why we think it is needed:

First of all, StackSafe would point the obvious, datacenters are veritable computer museums. Furthermore, they are owned and managed by a number of internal organizations. The organization’s IT department supports complex production infrastructures with components that can’t be imported into a sandbox. This includes mainframes, midrange machines running UNIX or some vendor’s own operating system, and industry standard systems running Windows, Linux, UNIX or Lord only knows what. It also includes SANs, special networking environments, Data warehouses, server farms and many other components outside of the IT organization’s direct control.

Specifically, our customers now have the capability to make Test Center a “permeable sandbox” where components residing on the internal Test Center virtual network can connect with external infrastructure components. If your storage network is too large to virtualize and pull into the testing sandbox, for example, now Test Center can reach out to the storage network for testing.

So if you can’t virtualize it, now you can connect to it.

In addition to the Virtual Man, we have received a positive response about this capability from bloggers like Tarry Singh from Virtualization for Everyone. We are excited because this new capability will help customers improve their testing effectiveness in lots of ways:

Reduce change risk by helping IT follow more realistic testing scenarios.
Improve accuracy of change impact analysis by evaluating interactions with external infrastructure components.
Extend the value of virtualized testing by enabling testers to include non-virtualized components in change test processes.

Please take a look at the release about our announcement to learn more, and feel free to visit the StackSafe website for more information about Test Center.