StackSafe Upgrades Test Center with Enhanced Support for Virtualized Environments

By VSM News Staff
published: Monday, August 04 2008

New release expands staging and testing capabilities with easier import of virtualized infrastructure components.

Vienna, Va. (PRWEB) August 4, 2008 -- StackSafe, Inc., a provider of pre-production staging and testing solutions for IT Operations teams, announced today that StackSafeTM Test Center now includes automated import of virtual infrastructure components. Users can easily import virtualized production environments into Test Center, enabling them to stage both virtualized and physical production environments for testing activities. With this upgrade, Test Center provides testing that covers the gamut of potential scenarios, from physical infrastructure stacks to virtual infrastructure stacks to "hybrid" environments that include both physical and virtual components.

"IT can use virtualization to duplicate a complete distributed environment within a single box, effectively offering the possibility of recreating a production environment with a minimum of resources and time," wrote JP Garbani, Forrester Research Vice President and Principal Analyst in the June 2008 Tech Horizons: Evaluating StackSafe's Test Center Risk Reduction Solution. "Duplication requires a deep knowledge of the production environment: This is where StackSafe's 'secret sauce' enters the picture. By providing the means to effectively collect the application and its environment directly from the production infrastructure, StackSafe's solution provides the 'sandbox' required to reduce the risks inherent in change."

With the uses of virtualization becoming more widespread, the IT Operations industry is beginning to see an increasing use of virtual infrastructure stacks in production. Enhanced support for virtualized infrastructure enables users to more easily import virtual workloads into Test Center, making it possible to test against virtual and physical environments for complete end-to-end infrastructure stack testing. This inclusion, along with the product's existing support for external infrastructure connectivity, gives Test Center a broad view of the entire IT Operations infrastructure, enabling testing across:

•     Physical machines - Production machines equipped with Windows, Red Hat Linux and CentOS Linux

•     Virtual machines - Test Center currently supports virtual machines on VMware ESX 3.x

•      External infrastructure components - Including large databases, mainframes and other network components that cannot be virtualized into Test  Center

Organizations choosing to employ StackSafe Test Center can now ensure that their entire software stack is represented in the testing process, enabling for faster change impact analyses and fewer rolled-back changes.

"Virtual machines are becoming increasingly common in today's heterogeneous IT Operations environment, and this enhancement to our virtualized import capability puts StackSafe ahead of the curve," said Loren Burnett, president and CEO of StackSafe. "Test Center squarely meets the needs of IT Operations teams no matter what their production environment looks like, with support included for physical, virtual and external infrastructure components, enabling them to improve their testing capabilities and reduce instances of downtime."