Accelerating through the Test/Dev cycle with Akimbi Slingshot
Accelerating through the Test/Dev cycle with Akimbi Slingshot
By Ann Ernst published: Wednesday, November 02 2005
Akimbi Systems develops virtual infrastructure management solutions optimized for use in software development and test organizations. VSM spoke with James Phillips, CEO, about the recent announcement of the company and its first product, Akimbi Slingshot.
VSM: You’ve recently introduced Akimbi and the Akimbi’s Slingshot product.
JP: We came out of stealth mode with the company and a new product, Akimbi Slingshot. We founded this company in direct response to customers who wanted the technology created at Ensim by my co-founding partner, Wilson Huang, that could automate the setup of complex software configurations.
We incorporated in September of 2004, and acquired the intellectual property that is the foundation of our product from Ensim. We have a mature technology and product base as a result of spinning the technology out and commercially packaging it.
VSM: How was the response at VMworld?
JP: We had a demo of Akimbi Slingshot and of an early version of our integration with PlateSpin, where we showed the P2V of templates into our system. The response was extremely positive. PlateSpin already has a great reputation in the VMware reseller and user community and the typical response at the show was “this makes complete sense.”
VSM: Tell us about Akimbi’s new relationship with PlateSpin.
JP: The most important part of the relationship is that we are licensing their technology and will be embedding it into our product line. Akimbi Slingshot is a Test-Dev focused automation platform that relies on virtualization technology to encapsulate, store off and later restore virtual machine images or collections of images to a shared server pool.
We are adding PlateSpin’s P2V capability to Akimbi Slingshot because customers who want to deploy our solution are requesting it. If they have set up software development and test labs their servers are already configured, and they want to rapidly import those into Akimbi Slingshot’s storage repository.
By having PlateSpin’s PowerConvert technology embedded, customers can import their existing servers as virtual machine images into Akimbi Slingshot’s repository, and then redeploy those on demand.
VSM: And Akimbi doesn’t have to recreate that technology. How long has the relationship been in effect?
JP: We’ve been talking to them for a number of months, and plan to partner on sales and marketing as well as technology. PlateSpin has primarily focused on server consolidation and more recently on disaster recover applications, and Akimbi on Dev-Test, so it’s a good market opportunity for us both.
VSM: What is the timeline for the new product release?
JP: We will have a product incorporating their technology generally available by the end of the year. PlateSpin has people from their offices in Toronto on site at our headquarters in California.
VSM: Why are customers coming to Akimbi?
JP: What’s going on in the marketplace is the evolution occurring in the architecture of enterprise software. Any enterprise application or software system that goes into production will have to talk to and through firewalls, identity-management systems, directory servers and various application servers; interact with different database systems; connect to existing enterprise application systems; render on browsers through multi-tier application architectures.
The result is that there has been a gradual increase in the number of software systems that any new software put into production must connect and interoperate with. If the architecture varies, the software may have to support different database systems and work with identity management and directory servers.
Customers are grappling with the number of different configurations they have to test through, particularly if there’s any manual effort involved. It’s going to be expensive, it’s going to draw out product or software development cycles and it’s tedious.
Juniper Networks is using our system to automate testing setup. They have 2,700 configurations they QA against for every regression test. They were a big VMware Workstation user, and had created virtual machine images that were stored on various computers. If they had to run one of the 2,700 tests, someone had to walk over to the appropriate workstation, find out where the image was stored, go into the UI, start it up, find another server, restart that image and connect the machines together. It was killing them.
Akimbi Slingshot completely automates their Mercury test management to automatically deploy and iterate through the configurations.
Another issue involves development teams who may be on opposite sides of the world. If a developer in the US makes middleware software, and all their testing is done in India, when the developers do a build they send it to India to run through test cases.
If India finds a problem they file a bug report with the developers. Most of the time the developers don’t have the same test environment and cannot reproduce the problem, and the bug eventually shows up in production. The ability to reproduce problems when you’ve got deployment complexity is urgent.
Some organizations have hundreds of software development teams who do a lot of in-house application development, and each of those development groups needs their own equipment. Because their applications run on their own configurations, they can’t really share equipment with anyone else.
Even though they only use the hardware 5% of the time on average, because they don’t go through a test cycle every day, they have thousands of servers locked up. We provide the ability to pool and share those resources.
This is a very different story than server consolidation, trying to take production systems and consolidate down to a finite set of servers for better efficiency. We can pool thousands of servers into banks of servers, and then Akimbi Slingshot can sit in front of each of these banks. The developers and test organizations can check out servers, check out configurations and re-provision the servers on the fly in 30 seconds or less.
VSM: Are they re-provisioning a physical server or a using virtual machine image?
JP: They’re using images. We build on top of VMware or Microsoft Virtual Server technology that acts as the substrate, and the developers build the application on top of that. Today we strictly support machine images. You can expect us to also support bare metal, or non-virtualized, components in a given configuration in the future.
At the highest level we’re a virtual infrastructure management company, but we are 100% focused on solving problems in the software development and test environment. There are a lot of solutions out there focused on quality. In the application development life cycle, the design phase, there are solutions to design for testability and quality, and people build processes around these solutions.
Because of increasing complexity, while I can build software and send it down to the QA organization for testing, if they have to manually set up every one of the configurations, there’s a huge gap in automation.
This is exactly what we address with Akimbi Slingshot. We call it a complex configuration capture and restore system, C3R, but it’s a virtual infrastructure management solution designed specifically to address the problems we just articulated.
VSM: You’re not actually doing the virtualization.
JP: We rely on VMWare and Microsoft to provide the virtualization layer. We expect to support the Xen open source hypervisor as that matures, and we will be extending beyond just VM support to support the setup of other non-virtualized components like network components and SAN storage devices in these complex configurations.
We provide software to the customer via a CD or a DVD. We want as many people as possible to get the benefit of this product, so we’ve designed the software to make it incredibly easy to install, configure and use. The customer installs the software on their server, and then takes a pool of shared server resources under management.
Our largest customer is a company called Teneros with over 300 servers in the shared pool they’re using as the deployment canvas. They are pushing virtual machine images out to this pool, and sending images from the pool to the configuration library where they’re stored for use by anyone in the organization.
Users interact with Akimbi Slingshot via their browser, and it can be programmatically leveraged right out of test scripts, which is what QA organizations typically do. We also have a complete web services API optimized for the software development and test environment, and integration with Segue, Compuware, Mercury and IBM’s Rational Test Development, or Automated Test environments.
VSM: Can you describe how it works?
JP: From a UI perspective, the user merely points to the Akimbi Slingshot server and looks in the library, where there could be hundreds to thousands of different configurations. In a data center I might have dozens of production applications I care about, but in a Test-Dev environment I can have thousands of permutations.
The library has great search features. I can find exactly the configuration I need and ask for it to be deployed; then Akimbi Slingshot looks at the pool of shared resources and makes a best-case provisioning decision. The images are moved out to the servers or referenced from a network-attached storage device.
Akimbi Slingshot talks to the virtual machine monitor on those individual servers and asks that the images be executed. Once that occurs, the test engineer can see all of the consoles on the same page and interact with them in his browser as if he’s sitting in front of them. And this entire process takes less than 30 seconds.
VSM: How does this help Test-Dev engineers?
JP: In a production environment I want to consolidate applications and ensure they’re available and reliable and performing well. In a Test-Dev environment, I care about maintaining a library of thousands of different configurations and iterating through those as fast as possible to get through the test plan quickly. Our ability to rapidly provision and restart multi-server configurations as a unit in less than 30 seconds means that the QA engineer is able to test the build far faster than he could before.
We can also suspend and capture the multi-machine configuration as a unit from the pool and send it back to the library. If a QA engineer finds a problem and wants a developer to take a look at it, often they’re not going to be able to stop testing in order to show it. Or the developer has to be brought into the lab because the QA engineer won’t be able to reproduce the problem.
With our system you can click a button in the browser and the entire state of the running multi-machine configuration is suspended and captured as a named unit to the library. We create an Akimbi LiveLink URL, which can be embedded automatically into the report in the bug tracking system being used. When the developer gets the bug report they can click on the URL and the configuration will be re-provisioned in the pool, on the best available resources, within 30 seconds.
VSM: What does your customer look like? Who is buying Akimbi Slingshot?
JP: Most of our customers are buying VMware or Microsoft Virtual Server and using it to store virtual machine images to try to replicate these environments. We have the most success with them because they understand the value of the virtualization technology.
They are comfortable with it and they trust it, but they also recognize that it’s not a solution to the business problem of managing thousands of configurations and sharing all the servers effectively between hundreds of users across different development and test groups.
There are some systems that attempt to provide virtual infrastructure management in a more data center-centric way. VirtualCenter from VMware is designed with data center and production application optimization in mind. It’s focused on a finite set of production applications that I care about for a single user, the data center administrator.
It provides some capability to store and restore virtual machines, but short of doing all the things that someone needs in the software development and test environments, like taking a multi-machine configuration out of the storage library and deploying it to the server pool multiple times, so multiple people can use the same configuration simultaneously on the same network, across physical servers in the pool, without having network conflicts.
That’s very important to Test-Dev, but it’s not something you worry about in a production environment. Because we are so focused on solving this business problem, we’re providing the performance they care about and the optimizations required in a packaged application that is very affordable.
VSM: Would you describe the technology for us?
JP: Our provisional patent name for it is “virtualized network topology with in-machine identity translation”. We draw a fence around the configuration that’s been deployed, and actively prevent conflicts from occurring between systems that may otherwise conflict – even if the machines in the configuration are spread across physical machine boundaries. It’s completely transparent to the user.
Behind the scenes the science is quite complex. We’ve developed networking device drivers for the virtualization technologies that we inject into the VMs, and we create a hidden virtual machine with routing software, with specially designed routing tables. We pull IP addresses out of an IP pool, reassign them on the fly, do network address translation.
VSM: You were saying that the same image can be used or copied by a number of different end users?
JP: Here’s an example. You have a Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 machine configuration, and five QA engineers who want to use that image simultaneously. When that image was captured into the library it had an IP address, and if five people check it out and deploy it to the server pool, they’re going to conflict.
Our technology allows you to insulate those configurations from each other, even across physical server boundaries, so that there is no conflict and they can all use the configuration at the same time.
Akimbi Slingshot can also move complicated software configurations from one place to another in a very efficient manner, and have them work when they show up even if there are different networking schemes in each place. That is very important as customers start to outsource, and they have distributed development organizations or testing.
VSM: What’s the value proposition for the customer?
JP: We’re able to quantify the value based on your environment - how many developers do you have, how many QA engineers, how long does it take you to get through a build cycle, how much do you spend on your equipment right now, what happens when you are unable to reproduce bugs?
Juniper Networks is our flagship customer. But we also have financial services organizations, healthcare organizations, other types of manufacturing and technology companies and lots of software companies using the product.
VSM: And you work with both VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server.
JP: We have a very strong relationship with Microsoft. We are the only software company that has been granted redistribution and OEM rights for their virtualization technologies. We have a packaging of our product that ships their virtualization layer in our box, so customers get a complete, out-of-the-box solution without having to buy anything else.
VSM: Is there anyone you perceive as competition?
JP: There is Surgient in Austin, Texas. They have a QA product that’s not as narrowly construed. Their QA application purports to solve the problems that we solve.
VSM: Basic virtualization of machines is becoming relatively commonplace. Whether it’s in production or not, everyone knows about it. They’ve heard about it even if they’re not doing it. Now we see the evolution of management tools, because just as users dealt with their physical server sprawl, they have to manage virtual server sprawl.
Virtualization is becoming a foundation tool upon which to build other tools.
JP: Another trend is driving the virtualization technology into the operating system. Microsoft has already announced that their hypervisor layer will be part of Windows. The Linux vendors are claiming they’re going to embed Xen open source virtualization technology into the OS. This will be another operating system service available to solution builders.
VSM: You have a special offer on Akimbi Slingshot available now?
JP: In concert with our announcement supporting the Microsoft’s virtualization roadmap and their R2 product release, we have a special offer through the end of the year. Customers who want to try the C3R technology in their Dev-Test processes and understand how it will fit into their existing infrastructure can do so at a lower price.
The offer provides 2 Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 licenses and 1 Akimbi Slingshot license for $995. It’s good value and lowers the barrier to adopting the technology.
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For more information about Akimbi, Akimbi Slingshot and the special offer, visit www.akimbi.com.
