StackSafe, Inc., a provider of pre-production staging and testing solutions for IT operations teams, announced today the immediate availability of StackSafeTM Test Center. Test Center is the first virtualized staging and testing solution for IT Operations teams that improves availability and resiliency through enhanced software infrastructure testing. StackSafe's solution directly addresses incomplete and ineffective IT Operations testing and analysis of changes to multi-tiered software infrastructure stacks.

"If IT Operations teams can test and certify changes to software infrastructures before they go live, then IT services become more available and resilient as well as more repeatable and better documented," said Gartner Donna Scott vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Comprehensive and efficient staging, testing and analysis are essential to achieving optimum levels of availability."

IT operations teams presently employ a variety of less than optimal approaches to testing changes before they are put into production--ranging from "smoke" testing of live systems to simply making the change with a "patch and pray" approach. With the release of Test Center, these teams now have the ability to quickly and easily create virtual copies of their software infrastructure and to test changes on these copies before they impact production environments.

"In today's fast-paced global economy, organizations are expected to make changes at an increasingly rapid rate while limiting the amount of downtime they experience," said Loren Burnett, president and CEO of StackSafe. "Test Center enables IT Operations teams to test changes at the speed of business while significantly reducing downtime."

Product Benefits

• Reduces the uncertainty and downtime associated with IT changes, thus avoiding costly application and system failure
• Enables pre-production changes to be made safely before they are implemented into the live environment
• Helps IT Operations teams to understand the potential impacts that changes could have on their environment--before they impact production systems
• Enables IT Operations to be more responsive to dynamic and changing business process requirements
• Improves confidence in IT changes, while reducing the percentage of time spent on testing and staging--which can significantly lower IT operating costs

"It is an honor and a measure of product excellence and innovation to be selected to launch at DEMO," said Chris Shipley, executive producer of DEMO. "StackSafe Test Center is in that elite class, and we are confident that Test Center will make waves in IT Operations."

 

Product Overview

StackSafe Test Center enables users to import production systems in order to conduct comprehensive staging, testing, analysis and reporting. Using virtualization technology, the imported system copies are networked into a working software infrastructure stack that closely represents the actual production configuration. IT Operations teams can then execute pre-defined and customized tests to understand the impact of changes before they touch the live environment. Typical testing activities within StackSafe Test Center include:

• Production changes
• Regression testing
• Patch testing
• Performance evaluation
• Security/Risk assessment
• Diagnostics and root cause analysis
• Emergency change testing
• Application upgrades
• Application assembly and validation
• Compliance reporting

Test Center enables IT Operations teams to include software infrastructure testing in the management of existing production environments easily and seamlessly. The product is licensed through a subscription model and packaged as a turnkey software appliance that runs on industry-standard x86 server hardware. The following features are included as part of Test Center:

• Operating system
• Virtualization and "one-click" image import capabilities
• Suite of IT Operations-focused testing and analysis tools
• Reporting and flexible output options
• Easy-to-use Web console
• Regular update service
• 24x7 technical support

Test Center is generally available as of today. For more information, please visit www.stacksafe.com.