Leading Financial Institution Enhances Application Environment Creation Using Midvision’s Environment Cloning Toolset
One of the UK’s leading financial institutions is currently undertaking a significant IT merger and has employed the MidVision’s environment cloning technology enabling them to create complex end to end application test environments within hours as opposed to days and weeks, enabling environment creation to be removed from the critical path of critical programme delivery activities whilst saving in excess of 100 man days from a build schedule of 130 days providing a 450% productivity improvement.
Business Needs
The client required significant numbers of complex end to end integrated test environments to be created within extremely challenging timescales in order to progress critical application development and test activities to enable key program timescales to be met.
An individual end to end environment consisted of between 12 and 18 applications, and a total of 20 end to end environments were required resulting in 276 application instances. Each application was a Chordiant based application consisting of, as a minimum, the following components:
- IBM HTTP Server
- IBM WebSphere Application Server
- IBM MQ
- Oracle Database
Upon delivery of the first environments, and with the environment acceptance criteria passed, the client required all other environments to be created identical to the original environments so that they could be proved working prior to any application or configuration changes being applied to them, thus reducing risk of prolonged smoke / pipe cleaning activities taking place in each set of environments.
The Solution
Already an existing user of MidVision’s RapidDeploy™ Application Release Automation and Deployment Module, MidVision recommended using the cloning technology that is available within the tool to enable cloning of all of the technical components of the environments as listed above.
Once the initial environments were created using the RapidDeploy™ interface and the environments deployed and confirmed fit for purpose, the client was able to utilize their own WebSphere administrators to create new test environments entirely through the RapidDeploy™ interface ensuring that all environment configuration that did not require changes was maintained exactly as in the source environment.
Each environment consisting of a minimum of 12 complex J2EE applications hosted in enterprise Unix environments took just half a day to create and deploy enabling testing to commence on the same day that environment creation started for many environments.
“The set up of these complex environments was achieved in record time. A massive amount of work was achieved in a short timescale. Whilst we had the support of MidVision consultants, it was really down to our team to deliver. This was our first major test of this specific RapidDeploy™ functionality and it passed with flying colours” WebSphere Manager
Benefits
Reduced Environment Creation Times
Complete environment suites consisting of multiple applications were created in approximately 4 hours, which reduced the overall environment creation time by in excess of 10 man days for specific environments. Across the total environment requirement in excess of 100 man days effort was saved.
Reduced Environment Shakedown Times
By adopting the recommended approach of creating the first environment, completing smoke test / pipe cleaning activity and then cloning all future environments from the first this means that pipe-cleaning activity was focused on the environment deltas only and reduced pipe-cleaning from 5 to 2 days for each environment.
