This is the sixth post in our series based on the new whitepaper "The Next Frontier for Virtualization: Over-Utilized Systems"
by
iTKO
(Ahrens, English). In this issue we cover how companies are applying Service
Virtualization to solve for over-utilization of core systems
and services needed for testing and development.
Examples of how SV Answers
the Challenges of Over-Utilized Systems:
Solving a Common Bottleneck – When each team can get their own
replicated test environment and data provided as a Virtual Service at minimal
cost, there is no longer a need to compete for testing time during a small
availability window, much less secure a capital expenditure just to get access
to a hosted service-based system.
Customer Example: A
leading US
airline replicated much of the functionality of a partner’s reservation system
that charged high per-use fees when used for testing purposes, as well as
restrictions on usage due to the fact that millions of transactions needed to
be handled on the system daily. Switching to a virtual service model of the
system allowed multiple teams to have their own stable environment and data for
test scenarios, as well as saving millions of dollars annually (up to $12M) in non-revenue-generating access fees for the
live service.
Solving Improper Capacity – Trying to pinpoint the reason for
functional errors and performance problems in a modern distributed software
architecture is becoming increasingly difficult. IT departments can seek to
throw more hardware and software at the problem, but that cannot solve the costly
and time consuming software setup and configuration effort of enabling test and
pre-production environments for multiple distributed teams to use.
Customer Example: A
leading bank which has grown by acquisition found that they could not
effectively load test middleware which tied more than 70 acquired systems
together using their existing tools. They had several developers attempting to
hand-code “stubs” and “responders” to replicate the environment for 2 years,
with little success. Using Service Virtualization techniques, two test
engineers configured realistic models of the current bank middleware
systems. They replaced the multi-year
“stub” project in a few months and grew the practice to include another half-dozen
teams across the bank. They have avoided up to $30M in costs for provisioning
new environments over the course of a year.
Solving Inefficiency – Every business faces increased pressure to
meet customer and regulatory demands with greater agility, and leveraging
distributed software components and integration frameworks can add agility to
our ability to deliver expected business outcomes. At the same time, the
service-oriented approach to delivering software makes it harder to ensure
service level performance and quality, due to an increased rate of change in
the environment.
Customer Example: A US Federal
agency needed to prove that their technology selections and architecture
elements were performance ready, before they were put in place in the live
environment. By virtualizing the rest of the environment and its expected
response times and load variability, they were able to compare benchmarks and
select the appropriate technology for their architecture, without needing to
“bang” on critical live systems used for weather, air traffic and defense
purposes.
Summary
Hardware
virtualization is becoming ubiquitous in large enterprises, offering immediate
cost savings and efficiency. While the concept of desktop and server
virtualization has great value for optimizing less utilized systems, it is
challenged in replicating heavily utilized or constrained systems such as
mainframes, incomplete components, or third-party services.
Consider how much
you invest in “under-utilized” hardware and desktop OS infrastructure, versus
the high cost of integrating and maintaining traditional software test
environments. There's a high probability that the development and integration
cost of those traditional test environments exceeds your hardware costs by
several orders of magnitude. The prohibitive expense of software test
environments means applications are not tested early or often enough, which
leads to even costlier failures in production. Virtualization of the behaviors
of over-utilized systems can address this serious shortcoming.
Instead of copying
the contents of a hard drive or replicating a piece of software running in an
OS, Service Virtualization focuses on modeling the communication paths “between
the boxes” – components such as web services, databases, RESTful services and asynchronous
messaging. This lets teams break their dependencies on the bottlenecks which
are preventing them from getting their jobs accomplished.
Development and
testing teams need access to an ever-increasing number of services and systems
of record that are not readily available. Service Virtualization is a strategy
for letting teams take the principles of virtualization beyond the data center,
simulating more distributed, complex environments, where significant value remains
to be realized.
This concludes our series on SV and Over-Utilization. I'd like to thank Ken Ahrens for coming up with this unique way of looking at virtualization. We hope you find parallels of over-taxed and unavailable systems within your own environment that offer similar opportunities for efficiency improvement.
