Q&A with Shinichi Urano of Kubisys
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VSM: Kubisys recently developed Thin Capture. Exactly what is Thin Capture? |
SU: We say “Test Lab in a Box for your In-Production Applications” to describe Thin Capture in its current packaging as a rack-mountable appliance.
More precisely, Thin Capture is the name of our solution that enables data centers to rapidly generate replicas of their in-production application environments, in a fully automated manner, using virtualization and storage technologies. The replica environment consists of virtual machines and virtual networking that are configured identically to production. The production storage is captured as well, and presented as virtual disks to the VMs. The resulting environments can be used as ideal testing/staging environments for validating software patches, updates, and configuration changes before rolling them out onto production.
The Thin Capture appliance is very easy to install – it only requires power and network connectivity. No extra storage or servers are needed. Once the appliance is configured and set to work with a set of production servers, replicas of the production environment can be created in just 15 minutes.
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VSM: How is Thin Capture important for the modern data center? |
SU: Modern data centers today host production applications that are critical to the business. In order to prevent outages due to conflicting or faulty patches and updates, tests must be done against them within a separate testing environment. Thin Capture enables streamlining of existing change management processes by allowing users to create and manage multiple such test environments within one appliance.
In this way, Thin Capture removes one of the major hurdles to having an agile data center, where the benefits of newer patches and updates are applied quickly, smoothly, and without risking downtime. This allows the IT organization to greatly accelerate responses to its users’ demands for not just fixes, but additional services and features that help the business operate better.
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VSM: How can customers directly benefit from using it? |
SU: With Thin Capture, there are several primary benefits that the customers will experience immediately.
- Fully automated creation of test environments mean no more tedious and time consuming task of having to provision environments for testing. There is no need to configure the application to work within the test environments, and no more having to copy the production data (e.g., database) to sync up the test environment with production.
- Multiple test environments mean many users can work simultaneously, each having access to his or her own copy of the test environment.
- Fast provisioning means no more waiting. Testers can test sooner, and changes can be rolled out more quickly and with confidence.
Additionally, because Thin Capture drastically improves the availability of these test environments, many alternative uses arise. For example, the captured environment can be used for training, or for doing demos. It’s also a great way to debug production problems or to test-drive application configuration changes.
