The Root of All Downtime

Question: What are the leading causes of unplanned downtime?

Answer: Changes, patches and maintenance work that IT Operations teams introduce into complex production software environments.

Gartner Group, June 2007, Architecting for 24x7 Availability, Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Management Summit, Orlando, Florida

StackSafe™ Test Center—Product Overview

Current IT Operations Testing Approaches Are Insufficient

IT Operations teams presently employ a variety of approaches to testing software changes before they are put into production—from scheduled testing downtime to patch-and-pray "smoke" testing of live systems. These approaches each present significant limitations that make them impractical, unaffordable or inefficient in the effort to understand the true business impact of changes to the software infrastructure.

The IT Operations Challenge

In today's software infrastructure environments, IT Operations teams must rapidly deploy configuration changes, manage performance tuning, ensure compliance and implement security controls on complex and highly interdependent IT systems; yet they are not afforded the types of testing resources and practices that are commonplace in many Development and QA departments.

The StackSafe™ Solution

In response to the need for better IT Operations testing tools and methodologies, StackSafe has developed StackSafe Test Center, a new, automated staging and testing solution that improves availability and resiliency through enhanced software infrastructure testing. Test Center directly addresses incomplete and ineffective IT Operations testing and analysis of changes to multi-tiered software infrastructure stacks.

Critical Business Activities

StackSafe Test Center enables both availability and change responsiveness through advanced change impact analysis and proactive evaluation of change scenarios in a safe sandbox testing environment. Test Center enables IT Operations to support a number of critical business activities, such as: