Industry News Desk

StackSafe announced the external infrastructure connectivity upgrade to its staging and testing solution, StackSafe Test Center. The solution creates a virtual copy of the software infrastructure stack and enables IT Operations teams to better test the impact of changes before releasing them to the production environment, reducing the uncertainty and downtime related to IT changes. With this upgrade, the virtualized Test Center environment can be extended to interact with non-virtualized system components that reside outside of the Test Center environment - enabling test scenarios across the entire end-to-end IT service.

"Virtualization technology offers the potential to deliver time-stressed, resource-thin IT operations staff a low risk way to test and assess the impact of making changes to the IT production environment," commented Richard Ptak, Founder and Analyst, Ptak Noel & Associates. "StackSafe's Test Center provides a validation environment that resolves a number of existing application deployment issues."

Complex software infrastructure environments may include components that cannot be virtualized into StackSafe Test Center. These include physical storage tiers, large databases, hardware-based network topologies, or distributed components not owned by the IT Operations team. By enabling the inclusion of these components in the test scenarios, users can now have a more complete view of the impact of changes across the entire end-to end IT service.

The addition of external infrastructure connectivity adds the following key features:

• Enabling inbound connectivity from external infrastructure components and services into Test Center
• Enabling outbound connectivity from Test Center to external infrastructure components and services
• Customized control of connectivity options

"After releasing Test Center earlier this year, we moved quickly to support external connectivity because it enables customers to test against elements that could not be virtualized due to complexity or access such as large storage databases and distributed infrastructure components," said Loren Burnett, president and CEO of StackSafe. "By accommodating extended infrastructure in the testing process, this updated version enables us to better deliver on our promise of reduced downtime and more effective change and release management."