Launching at DEMO

Posted January 29th, 2008 by Dennis Powell

Pardon me for beaming today, but I’m excited to announce the formal launch of StackSafe^TM Test Center. What better place to launch our flagship product than at DEMO ‘08, “The Launchpad for Emerging Technology” conference. If you’re not up to speed on DEMO ‘08, please check out this unique annual event or check out our DEMO ‘08 Solution Center.

We are pleased to launch this groundbreaking solution to the market. StackSafe Test Center is a staging, testing and analysis solution for IT Operations. It helps IT Operations teams understand the impact of change to their production infrastructures before they unleash these changes to the live environment.

Previously we’ve provided information about testing maturity, change management maturity and downtime. A most interesting statistic is that 43% of organizations point to insufficient pre-production testing as the root cause of changes that go awry. It’s because IT Operations teams face change and release management challenges that we call IT’s “Perfect Storm”:

Complex mission-critical production infrastructures are very difficult to understand and control
All of this complexity needs to run nearly 24×7x365 – even the systems that yesterday weren’t considered mission-critical
IT faces continued requests for change to production from the Change Control Board, the security administrator, the senior executive, the business owner, the vendor, the IT manager…

These factors hamper change and release management success. Our research has shown that 25% of all changes to production cause some type of negative impact, and 10% of all changes have to be rolled back because of serious problems.

We are excited about StackSafe Test Center’s ability to efficiently and effectively address these challenges. The product is a universal testing sandbox that IT can now use as the ready-made test environment for production changes. Physical production servers are imported into the StackSafe Test Center pre-production virtualization library with the push of a button. Pre-defined tests and reports increase IT Operations confidence that changes are thoroughly tested and certified for the production environment.

StackSafe Test Center is also a “next generation” virtualization solution that leverages the benefits of virtualization in new ways beyond server consolidation. There is no separate investment in P2V or virtual environment technology required, so customers enjoy virtualization benefits with significant technology, deployment, or training investment.

Test Center is easy to buy, easy to deploy, and easy to use. We offer:

Subscription-based licensing model at a cost effective price point.
“Soft appliance” packaging includes the OS, virtualization, Web Console, tests and reports
Regular product updates included in the subscription fee
Installs on a variety of standard server hardware and imports physical Red Hat and CentOS Linux servers
Windows 2008 is on schedule to release in just a couple weeks, other platforms will be supported based on market preference

Customers install StackSafe Test Center in the morning, start importing production images into Test Center by lunchtime, and begin testing and analyzing the impact of changes to the pre-production environment in the afternoon.

There is more information on our website – including whitepapers, research reports and a flash demo – please check out the value that StackSafe Test Center delivers to IT Operations teams struggling to deliver accurate and efficient change and release management.