“If we get our development environment in two hours vs. two days, we could measure success in the cost of developer’s time. But the real benefit is so much more than just fast. There’s improved quality, speed to market, and getting a patch tomorrow rather than waiting ‘til Friday is another way to support customer satisfaction.“
MARK MOSELEY – VP of IT
ACTIFIO FOR DEVOPS & DEVELOPERS
Data Virtualization Boosts Application Development Efficiencies
OVERVIEW
Deliver heterogeneous, application-centric, SLA-driven automation for Test Data Management.
Because applications are integral to business growth, there’s a heavy burden on application developers to provide modern, integrated, worry-free applications in short time frames. And they need to iterate quickly with new features, functions, and competitive benefits.
The objectives are to create higher quality applications that produce faster opportunity advantages. That requires direct and straightforward access to all of the technical resources and production data.
More than any functional or technical considerations, applications are about data and how to develop, test, and deploy new code rapidly. To easily access that data, we need to rethink the foundational relationships that govern the connection between data and the development and test environments for applications.
“We have 50 developers in Melbourne and Sydney that we need to keep productive. Using Actifio, we now automatically provide them with a fresh copy of the production database every six hours. If they need immediate access at times, we can do that too.”
Ferdy Suharta – DevOps Mangaer
CHALLENGES
Gaining access to a single database copy for use in application development can entail multiple steps and weeks of waiting, particularly in large organizations.
It’s even more difficult with today’s data payloads measured in terabytes and petabytes. Gaining access to large data sets can require multiple teams to provision storage, network, and OS before the app developer can get at it. It’s a technical problem, a security problem, and a business problem.
Data sources also vary, touching virtual and physical platforms, databases, hypervisors, and operating systems. If storage and compute resources, and security permissions are not already in place, the time stretches even longer and may involve added infrastructure costs.
Any sensitive data must also be protected before access can be granted for development teams. But that can mean intensive manual data masking work that adds more delays. If masking is skipped or ignored, the risks for exposure to hacking or potentially dangerous leaks increases.
Missed opportunities mean lost revenues. Even after release, delays can continue in change management, approval, and provisioning processes.
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HOW Actifio HELPS
Actifio enables developers to non-disruptively access virtual data copies for development and test environments.
The Actifio data virtualization platform creates a “golden copy” of production data. Once virtualized, the data can serve multiple uses in backup, DR, and analytics, all while eliminating extra physical copies that are no longer needed.
The virtualized data can support application development, test, and operations pre-test simultaneously. It resets traditional approaches and accelerates time-to-value capabilities.
Virtualized data gives DevOps a new independent potential. As applications decouple from infrastructure, it means speed. Self-service becomes viable. Reduced bandwidth, storage, and licensing costs follow, with significant infrastructure savings.
Virtualized data provides high-fidelity production data copies that present an opportunity to improve enterprise information lifecycles. Faster development means faster time to market (TTM). Actifio virtualizes data to create better access with better protection, control, cost, scalability, and performance without impacting production.
Business opportunities are created from faster application releases. Faster TTM increases sales and revenue, market share, and competitive differentiation. But we know that DevOps isn’t all about developers, it’s really about the business.
Immutable references create a permanent copy for compliance and investigatory purposes or to detect data tampering.