Press Clipping

Publication : Express Computer

Date : Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Edition : National

Page : 23-29

FEATURE

BEYONDOPTIMISATIONTest and Development environments on private Cloud have gonebeyond capex optimization to acting as disaster recovery supportsystems.

BY HEENA JHINGAN

Indiais at the cusp of a Cloudrevol u uon, and adoption of thistechnology is massively driven bythe IT I ITeS vertical. The ITlITeSis a key vertical consuming theCloud technology as most of the

players under this segment offerservices to global customers and theyneed to invest in the technology to servetheir clients.

Most of the large Indian IT vendorshave built private Cloud environmentsfor their internal development and testprovisioning, and some have builtpublic Cloud services platforms todeliver mainly Infrastructure as aService (laaS) and Software as a Service(SaaS) solutions.

The overall Cloud market in India israpidly growing and average growthrate has been in the order of 65% overthe last three years. At this point intime, private Cloud market is about $750 mn, including both the hardwareand the software components.

According to Praveen Bhadada,Director - Market Expansion, ZinnovManagement Consulting, traditionally,the growth of ITIITeS companies had

~ The Resource Centre

FEATUHE"IT/lTeS COMPANIESARE FOCUSED ATINTEGRATION OF IT FORDELIVERANCE OFSERVICE ON TOP OF IT,EITHER BY ADOPTINGCLOUD DR THROUGH AHOSTED MODELPRAVEEN BHADADA,DffiECTIlR . MAR1IE'I' EXPANSIDN, ZINNDVMANAGEMENT [llNSULTING

been around head count. however asthey grew further, they could not haverelied solely on adding resources. This iswhere the Cloud computing conceptcame handy. without having to invest inresources directly; these IT firms couldinvest in platforms for service deliveryand develop several test cases on theCloud that could be used by thedevelopers from anywhere.

"This way the companies can drivenon linear growth and secondly. Cloudprovides the capability, enabling anyresource to get access to any resource. Amajority of the ITIITeS organisations arenow putting their money in buildingCloud-based infrastructure. They arefocused at integration of IT fordeliverance of service on top of it, eitherby adopting Cloud or through a hostedmodel." Bhadada noted.Development and testing arc crucial

components in the IT/ITeS space. Nearly25% of the revenues for these companiesare driven by software testing. Tbemarket watchers view the addressablemarket for Software testing as a Serviceto be as big as tbe entire software market,as they believethat all of the testing couldpotentially reside on tile Cloud in future.

From the revenues perspective. DaisyChittilapilly, VP- ITS Sales. Cisco-IndiaSaarc, observed that since TT/ITeScompanies in India earned 70-80% of therevenues from application developmentand testing, it was critical for them tooptimize cost and processes on thesefronts.

"All the top five Indian IT companiesIn India, including the likesofWipro andHCLare in the process ofmoving criticalworkloads to Cloud. EMCis known to beusing private Cloud extensively for testand development" she said.

A key factor responsible for making

Test aud Development (T&D), a lowhanging fruit for the enterprises to bemigrated to the Cloud is the fact that atthese stages there is no actual productionhappening. and thus the SLArequirements may not be very high.

Moreover. with the overall span ofproject and lime to market shrinking.cros are compelled to adopt thenecessary evil called Virtualizationtargeting the private Cloud in general.

N Nataraj, CW. HexawareTech nologies elaborated that in mostinstances, the IT heads create a blue printfor tile servers. For example, ifone has anenvtronrnent ofustng 100 servers a year.a standard server template can becreated. which is typically run from theprivate Cloud. The template can beaccessed by tbe users. and the businessunits. The end user business units log onto the server dashboard and select servertemplate to execute the test ordevelopment cycle, and because each ofthe server instances is independent so enduser couId perform whatever the actionwithout being concerned aboutmodifying the environment of the otherend user. Once they are done with theproject they release back the instances tothe pool.

"Sucb a practice of virtualization hasbrought server provisioning time downfrom 40 days to one hour and resulted innearly 40% reduction in bardware cost.Utilization of the hardware bas jumpedfrom 10% to 50%. When our revenuesgrew about 30% last year, the amount ofservers that we added was the least onyear on year basis. When one server canscale up to 28 virtual servers, thephysical server addition is no more arequirement," he corroborated.

Saji Thopill. General Manager-Enterprise Cloud Computing and Data

VlRTUALIZATION HASBROUGHT SERVERPROVISIONING TIMEDOWN FBDM 40 DAYSTO ONE HOUR ANDRESULTED IN NEARLY40% REDUCTION INHARDWARE COSTNNATARAl,eto, HEXAWABE TECHNOLOOIES

Center. Wipro. observed that theredel1nitely is a trend that that is puttingthe Indian IT industry into the path ofusing private Cloud.

However. he pointed that was it wasimportant to know the differencebetweena virtualized environment and a full-fledged private Cloud. "In the industryyou will see vlrtualization.virtualization++ and tile private Cloud.These are various stages in an enterprise'sjourney to Cloud,virtualization being thefirst step. .Infact, these environments aretechnology islands in themselves, andcannot be called a private Cloud set up.SometImes. tbe enterprises could be todoing basic levelsoftest and developmentin that kind of an environment There areverticals. where you could do 100% ofthe test and development processes in thevirtualized environment." Thopillexplained, adding that today everycustomer of theirs bad a virtualizedenvironment. if not a Cloud.

Tbere are fundamentally three driversfor a growing trend of using Cloudenvironments for Test and Development.From pure technology view, it is aboutproviding greater value on the businessand aligning between IT and business. Abig wave wlthin the enterprises today isthe EYOD phenomenon and anenterprise's IT budgeting model.

Dhiraj Sinha, Head-Testing Practice,Dell Services tbat does testing anddevelopment for its own consumptionand at the same time also provides it as aservice, said. "Unlike in the past whenthe mobile applications were focused onconsumer consumption. today it isimportant that critical pieces ofenterprise apps are available on themobile devices. there are a number ofplatforms that the developers need to dealwith."

THERE ARECONVERSATIONSHAPPENING IN THE TESTAND DEVELOPMENT SPACEAROUND NOT JUST THEINFRASTRUCTUREVlRTUALIZATlON,BUT VlRTUALlZlNG THESOFTWARE LAYER AS WELLDAISY CHITTILAPILLY;vp. ITS SALES, CISCO·lNDlA SAARC

Agility, flexibility andstandardisationIT and budgeting aligned to an

organisation's strategy is a winningcombination. A smart IT bouse organisesitsinvestments in "Run-Grow-Transform"method. "Run" mainly is for the "Lights-on" operations while "Grow-Transform"is strategic and innovation driving. Testand Development allocation is majorlyfromthe "grow-transform" bucket.

"Typical IT/ITes is heavy on "Run"part with investments many a timesexceeding 75% of the over all spend. Ahealthy, early technology adopter andleading [T house should surely have its'grow-transform' budget exceeding 25 to30%, saving a good pie for T & D. andwork towards increasing this further. Toavoid heavy cape x due to software. toolsand its support involved in T&D,the nextgeneration IT houses are leveraging ascontracts with stringent SLA's andslowly looking out for Cloud leverage."said Sumanth Tarigopula, Director.Global Delivery-India. HP EnterpriseServicesAn efficient T & D is very critical and it

shifts an IT/ITeS from being a'commodity like service provider' to 'aninnovative partner' for business groups.Tartgopula added. saying that thecurrent snapshot of IT/ITes landscapeworldwide is dominated by more ofTesting Clouds for enterprises whiledevelopment is catching up at a very fastpace.Definitely an integrated Cloud storyforentire enterprise is a long way to go. Amixof business process into IT T & D isyet to be seen due to many complexdimensions including security. datasegregation and also organisationstructure and KPf's.

Why private Cloud?The large [1' firms have already made a

significant investment in theirinfrastructure - servers. storage. datacentres. their first priority is to maximizethe usage of the existing infrastructure,rather than make new investments; inthat case the enterprises adopt a modelwhere by virtualizing their serverinfrastructure they can increase theexisting efficiency or utilisation of theexisting boxes in place.

1'&0 leveraging Cloud reduces theinfra procurement cycle, build. supportand maintenance overhead. Cloud alsoreduces the cost of infra planning andinvolved Capex. The reduced cycle forprovislonlng and fulfillment atresource/platform layers is a big boon toT&D from Cloud build and managetechnology.

The industry watchers are of theopinion that the IT ecosystem mostly isheterogeneous with multiple vendorsand subsystems. This makes integrationacross infra (In-premises/olT-premises) achallenge. Though a much talked about'true hybrid' environment is yet to beseen. Besides. security adds the additionalcomplexity. Hence private Cloud fits thebill much closer in immediate termcompared to Public Clouds. Contrary toIT/ITes T&D' some of the generic T&Dinan open developer forum is supportedvery well on the public Cloud.

Fit for CloudCloud is firming its position in the

market as a mature technology. Theenterprises are at various levels of thismaturity curve. virtualization being thebasic step. Most of the enterprise havevirtualized their servers. and are now

NOW A VERY SMALLAMOUNT OFTESTAND DEVELOPMENTIS HAPPENING ONPHYSICALENVIRONMENTMANDAR BULIWlNI,VP - SOWTIONS ENGINEEBING ANDPRIVATE CLDUD PBAC'l'lCE, NETMAGIC

looking at virtualizing their orchestrationlayer. Today the licensing models arecomplicated, so there the industry iswitnessing consolidation.

"There are conversations happeningin the test and development space aroundnot just the infrastructure virtualization.but virtualizing the software layer aswell," Chittilapilly of Cisco said.

According to Thoplll of Wipro. most ofthe next generation applications are'cutting edge and by default are acandidate for using a private Cloud. At thedevelopment stage. there could be differentdevelopers using different workstations.all the applications can be delivered usingvirtual desktop irrespective of what back-end platform they are working on. At theback-end we are forced to a have dedicatedenvironment for a customer just because ofcompliance. or graphics processes. Also attimes some big data applications are notmade for Cloud.

Bhadada explained that there arehundreds of applications that are not onCloud. but those applications still could betested using Software testing as a Service.The enterprises essentially pick softwaretesting use cases in the Cloud and runthose cases on the application. soirrespective of the fact that the applicationis on Cloud or off it, the Software testingon Cloud could enable all of this.

Mandar Kulkarni. VP SolutionsEngineering and Private Cloud practice,Netmagic, informed that all the new testand development environments werenow coming on Cloud. in fact theenvironments that were build earlier.about 2-3 years back. were now beingconverted into Cloud.

"Now a very small amount of test anddevelopment is happening on physicalenvironment. except for the cases wherethe applications. like the system

FEATUREINDUSTRY HAS BEENMAKING EFFORTS TOMITIGATE CONCERNSAROUND SECURITY INTHE CLOUD, WHICH HASLED TO MORE FAITH INPUBLIC CLOUD, EVENFOR T&D ACTIVITIES.SHIKANTH KARNAKoTA,DIRECTOR - SERVER AND CLOUD BUSINESS,MII:IlOSOFT

application that need to talk to hardwaredirectly, they have to be deployed onphysical infrastructure, in that casethere islittle choice," he said.

Integrating test andproduction

Typically When enterprises wouldwant to provide development and test

environment, they would have twopaths- PaaS and IaaS. PaaS would bethe way forward for web, JAVA andother next generation of the applicationsthat are developed on the platforms andrun on the internet. For this category,there is a particular kind of investmentgoing into providing a complete privateCloud solution in terms of app server,web server, the databases and the toolsaround it.

THE ENTERPRISES ARENOW LOOKING ATFUNCTIONALITIESOFFERED BY A HYBRIDENVIRONMENTSUDHIRHAD, truENTERPRISE SERVICES, HP

The enterprise class solutions like SAPand Oracle ERP applications, have aparticular kind of architecture in termsof database server, an app server, and aparticular way of managing the overallCloud capability, so under Infrastructureas a Service comes a separate land of asolution. Under IaaS, they could have aDevelopers landscape, a QA landscape,a testing and a staging one whichculminates into productiou. Most of the

A LOT MOREOPTIMISATION NEEDSTO COME INTERLACEDWITH SUBJECTEXPERTISE FORDEVELOPMENTCAPABD.lTIESSURESH SAMUELJAYASEELAN,DlJlECTOR TESTINll SERVICES, esc INDIA

service providers prefer to keep these asseparate pieces so that they can availoutsourcing services and focus on thecore services.

"Commodinzatlon of the hardware hasled to a horizontal approach for IaaSsolutions, However. PaaS is moreverucallsed as business level testingrequires vertical-focused solutions.depending on the size of the enterprise. Alot more optimisation needs to comeioterlaced with subject expertise fordevelopment capabilities," reasoned,Suresh Samuel [ayaseelan. DirectorTesting Services. CSC India.

He explained that development andtesting is a complete life cycle. At theinitial stages. an enterprise could bedealing with hundreds (100-150)configurations. When the processes arepromoted to QA environment thenumber of conflgurattons could bereduced LO about 20 to 25 of them and atthe staging level these could further bereduced La 3-4, while at production therewill be on final image.

"Since multiple activities are beingtracked in the development and testcycle, making sure that all the changesthal are introduced into the system areconverged and the impact of one does notaffect the other. is a challenging task inthe physical environment. It becomesdifficult as conflguratlon changes arehappening rapidly as workload comes at amuch laster pace. you need to developtools that can match the pace at whichthe workload is moving, Cloud isequipped to manage that kind of agility,"he elaborated.

Traditionally, the test environmentcould support ouly one tool. be itfunctional, performance. applicationsecurity. governance- compliance tool.But in a Cloud, the infrastructureremains in utility mode, and So are the

lools as enterprises use SaaS. In thatcase. the enterprises pay for whateverthey use, Besides they could use morethan one tool. They could dotrtangulation on the code and overalldomain gets reduced. and for a lowercost. the enterprises get more tools andgreater productivity,

"In a lest Iifecycle, you develop agolden image that is ready to deployed inthe production. If the production Sitefaces a disaster or business discontinuitySituation, the enterprises can pick thegolden Image from the test environmentand use it as DR support. If a disasterstrikes it normally takes a week or about10 days to get it back on the track,however, witb Cloud support this timebas been dramatically shrunk to 4-5hours. This is emerging as a very uniquething ill the testing and developmentspace." [ayaseelan elaborated.

Another. big draw for enterprises todepend on Cloud for 'r&D is the ease ofmanaging the virtual users or plastictralllc, For the next generation users likeAmazon or Hallmark. there could be aspike in the business on certain days. ifthe infrastructure is uot prepared tomanage that, the site might come down,While testing in the Cloud environment itis possible to generate as many virtualusers as desired. Conventionally. all thevirtual users could be created from theone given site, in Cloud you can engineerthe trafflc data volume, stimulate virtualtralllc data from various sites.

The biggest trend that SrikanthKamakota, Director Server and CloudBusiness. Microsoft. saw for T&D in cloudwas the emergence of a commondevelopment platform for the multipledevices.

"We see a shift in the developerperception. and see them breaking freefrom the traditionaJ conservativeness, and

MOST OF THE NEXTGENERATIONAPPLICATIONS ARECUTTING EDGE AND BYDEFAULT ARE ACANDIDATE FOR USING APRIVATE CLOUD.SAJI THOPILL,GENERAl. MANAllEB· ENTERPRlSE!J1JUDCOMPUTING AND DATA CENTER, W1PRO

accepting software convergence. PrivateCloud adoption in general may bedominant at the moment, however. thePublic Cloud is growing faster. Industryhas been making efforts to mitigateconcerns around security in the Cloud.which has led to more faith in publicCloud. even for T&D activities,"Karnakota said.

Testing timesThough Cloud environment makes

testing and development process morecost effective. agile and standardised.there are a plethora of challenges that ithurls at the enterprises. Experts believethat managing workload andinfrastructure interaction is a tough taskfor the enterprises, while working incloud.

Many new technologies are drivingtest on Cloud. so enterprises need to keeppace with the new technological trendsand more importantly. a factor thatdemands great care is latency planning.

Stressing that most of the enterprisesthat have already deployed Cloud. Sudhir-Rao. CTO. Enterprise Services, HP. saidtbose enterprises were now looking aLIunctionaltues offered by a bybrid cloudenvironment. This becomes aU the morechallenging when they demandlnteroperabllity between hybrid. private,managed and public cloud envtroumeots.

Going forward. business dynamicsdriving organisations to have effectiveshared Kl'Is between IT and businessdomains supported by technology willlead to genesis of integrated ecosystemwhere we will witness more and moreorganisations hosting its IT and businesson an integrated Cloud environmentcomfortably and wi.th full compliance.

beena.lblngan@express!ndla.com