Surgient, a leading provider of IT service delivery and virtualization automation, today announced initiatives with Microsoft to dramatically improve how enterprise IT services are tested and deployed. The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform integrates with virtualized systems running on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, providing IT and Quality Assurance professionals with self-service access to resources for testing IT services throughout the deployment process. Surgient’s unique approach streamlines VM lifecycle management and automates virtualized infrastructure, reducing capital and operating costs, and increasing user productivity.
Manual or semi-automated processes for deploying IT services are expensive and time-consuming, and create a daunting task for IT operations. The high rate-of-change of testing environments further exacerbates this challenge, creating the need for consolidation of testing infrastructure with virtualization, combined with enterprise-class lab automation, dynamic capacity management and self-service experience. With Surgient and Microsoft software, IT can streamline virtualized infrastructure management, automate resource administration, and provide an easy-to-use self-service interface for virtual resource users. With lab, lifecycle and stage management, the Surgient Platform, with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, is a comprehensive solution for optimizing virtualized infrastructure.
“More and more companies are deploying Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. Surgient’s solution puts this virtual infrastructure to work by streamlining how IT services are deployed,” said Sameer Jagtap, vice president of business development & product strategy at Surgient. “Surgient helps manage and automate virtual environments for some of the most complex and disparate global enterprises. Our platform creates a centrally managed, virtual server pool that can be accessed on a self-service basis by a wide variety of end users, including testing and QA professionals.”
“The setup and teardown of complex, multi-tier test environments traditionally takes days and even weeks. With virtualization and automation solutions from Microsoft and Surgient, customers can easily select and deploy test configurations in a self-service manner, often in just minutes,” said Dai Vu, director of virtualization solutions, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft Corp. “IT departments can improve resource utilization and reduce capital costs by consolidating virtual machines onto fewer physical resources and dynamically managing lab infrastructure capacity.”
The solution has been tested in Microsoft’s Enterprise Engineering Center in Redmond, Wash., against a complex, multi-tier SAP NetWeaver Architecture. For the implementation, Microsoft and Surgient IT professionals were challenged with the traditional issues surrounding test environment deployment: underutilized compute capacity, difficult setup and teardown, and limited cloning and replication. To address these challenges, existing physical infrastructure and content was quickly virtualized using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager and then registered with the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform. The combination of Microsoft virtualization and Surgient automation resulted in: a dramatically improved deployment process, further resource consolidation, simultaneous deployment of identical multi-machine SAP configurations, and a self-service experience for end users.
Surgient is demonstrating its solutions in booth #430 at Microsoft TechEd North America 2009, which is being held May 11-15 in Los Angeles. Additional information, including a webcast presentation of the solution, is available at www.surgient.com/microsoft.