Virtual Development/Test Environment

With ever increasing demands to reduce costs, one company elected to virtualize their development and functional test environments. The concept was to create virtual development and test environments to support as many required instances by developers, testers, project management, documentation writers, etc. The virtual environment would provide on-demand and as needed resources when necessary to complete specific tasks. The virtual environment was also to be transparent to the user community. Information Network Corporation designed the processes and standards that met the customer’s virtualization requirements.

Virtual Disaster Recovery

After a large merger and acquisition, an international corporation needed to provide disaster recovery and failover testing for over 6,500 systems, 30+ datacenters, 23 server vendors, 4 storage vendors and thousands of configurations when considering os versions, patch levels, card types and firmware versions. Some of the servers, OS and application combinations were developed prior to virtualization or did not support virtualization in their current environment. The use of external storage was common across the majority of applications. The organization conducted Disaster Recovery drills twice per year and the event was a natural fit to extend testing to support virtualization. Using the DR testing event, Information Network Corporation implemented testing for external storage, SAN boot, storage virtualization (at the switch), Physical to Virtual (P to V) testing at the server level, OS version testing and capacity evaluations.

Application Consolidation

A software vendor found that during release testing it used a large number of resources including support staff, desktops, windows and linux servers distributed across the enterprise. As the software vendor became more global, it became necessary to consolidate applications used to support the development and test effort. The concept was to consolidate, categorize and build a reuse knowledge base to support development and test. The resulting environment provided increased server utilization, simplified infrastructure management, reduced support staff, elimination of redundancies, increased performance, reduced maintenance costs, reduced power, reduce cooling and reduced footprint. In addition to the environmental reduction, a cost savings in development was realized through shared code and common tools across the enterprise.

Follow the Sun Computing

A software vendor decided to Off-Shore a segment of their application development and functional testing to India in an effort to reduce overall costs. Information Network Corporation was engaged to provide an economical solution based on the work force availability. The Principal Solution Architect developed mechanisms to rapidly repurpose environments to “Follow the Sun” meaning to have environment images available during business hours based on time zones. The vendor realized savings in Total Cost of Ownership through infrastructure reduction.