Centralized Command and Control of Enterprise Applications
Effective management of application deployment development and testing environments mitigates risk, reduces the cost of implementation into production and accelerates the benefits of the new or upgraded system. Streamlining the application lifecycle allows your company to realize the return on investment (ROI) much more quickly. In heterogeneous environments, managing the application lifecycle becomes vital, as new applications and upgrades must be developed, tested and implemented in an integrated way to support enterprise IT.
Fraught with risk, development and testing cycles are often pressured by tight deadlines, limited budgets and competing demands for IT staff time and resources. Reducing the risks inherent in application deployment and code changes can compress implementation time and lessen complexity, implicitly improving your ability to meet deadlines and apply fewer resources to implementation projects.
Risks in the Application Deployment Lifecycle:
Most businesses take a phased approach to new application implementation both for packaged solutions and those developed in-house. The application deployment lifecycle refers typically to development, testing, and staging before deploying an application to end-users in a production environment. These four or sometimes more phases each require a discrete technology environment to support the specific activities. As these environments constantly fluctuate, additional equipment and licenses must be provisioned, and the rapid and frequent changes, especially in development and test environments, can strain technology and human resources.
The development and testing environments change most frequently and drastically. Modern software development methodologies engender iterative development and testing practices. Even for packaged applications, integration development and application customization require constant rollbacks, trial and error bug fixes or parameterization, and the necessary exploration of new ways to satisfy strict end-user requirements.
Staging environments, also know as pre-production, tend to mirror production, allowing the Quality Assurance (QA) team to gauge the effectiveness of new applications and configurations in every conceivable situation. Unlike the production environment, though, test servers experience many more changes, as potential problems are identified and addressed. Of necessity, administrators are forced to add and remove applications frequently and change application configurations, with the goal of not disrupting other tests.
Ideally, the production environment remains undisturbed, with new applications added carefully and in accordance with strict change management procedures. The most sensitive stage of the application lifecycle has the most salient risk, as any misstep can impede the business and even be noticed by customer.
The goal is to improve efficiency within each stage and make movement from one lifecycle stage to the next more predictable. You can attain this efficiency through centralized command and control of application deployment and execution. Applications can reach end-users more quickly and economically, reducing overall time-to-market while having been tested thoroughly to ensure that business requirements are satisfied.
DataSynapse FabricServer
DataSynapse FabricServer centralizes the command and control of application deployment and execution by virtualizing applications and guaranteeing that capacity is available on demand.
In a mixed-architecture environment, FabricServer reduces the system administration support needed at each stage of the application lifecycle and facilitates the movement of code among environments. Managed through a central, web-based user interface, FabricServer can allocate resources dynamically throughout each lifecycle environment, making it easier to develop and test code even when hardware resources are constrained. FabricServer creates a pool of resources across the data center to run applications, harnessing the power of the entire infrastructure to support specific applications. The flexibility afforded by FabricServer streamlines system utilization, reduces operating costs, and ensures that developers and QA teams have access to the appropriate resources when they need them.
