The Challenge: IT organizations are under immense pressure to provision, install and deploy software environments quickly and efficiently. Making matters worse, the number of software environments that need to be supported has exploded due to all the permutations of hardware, application servers, firewalls, browsers, and databases. The issues that must be overcome include:
- Installations that are complicated, error-prone and arduous - often taking days to get just right.
- Environments that are difficult to administer, and support.
- New equipment constantly arriving that needs to be provisioned immediately.
- Inflexible environments and systems that are difficult to reconfigure.
- Inconsistency between environments that should be standard.
- Scarce hardware resources to support all the ongoing projects.
- Configuration idiosyncrasies between development, test and production.
- Managing patches in hundreds of environments.
Our Solution: Quickly and economically set up development, test, staging and production environments using Virtual Iron’s rapid provisioning and image management capabilities. Software environments can be deployed in minutes and repetitive configuration tasks are eliminated. The Virtual Iron platform enables users to:
- Rapidly provision equipment and deploy software reference stacks to create standardized environments for development, test and production.
- Quickly and easily stage an existing application on a new physical server, when that application outgrows its current physical server, or when the current physical server fails.
- Coordinate configurations and footprints between development, test, staging and production environments by cloning installed systems and copying software images.
- Roll back to previous known environments.
- Move virtual servers around live with their operating systems.
- Remove hardware restrictions by allowing teams to use physical hardware that does not need to be identical across development, QA and production. For example, a virtual server can be moved from an AMD 2-way server to an Intel 4-way server.
