Data Center Automation

Optimizing Test Environments

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Increase the speed of testing, reduce costs and shorten time to market of business applications

In today’s software development environment, testers are routinely pressured to accelerate the testing phases in order to place software into production more quickly. However, their productivity is inhibited by the multitude of manual steps required to create each unique test configuration. Manual steps are error-prone and often result in repetitive errors throughout testing phases, ultimately resulting in costly rebuilds, missed deadlines and slower time to market.

Software testers need a comprehensive solution to help provision the testing infrastructure, avoid errors, reduce labor costs, optimize use of testing resources and speed business application delivery.

High Cost diagram

IBM Tivoli® Provisioning Manager offers the ideal solution to help testers automatically provision different environments throughout the testing life cycle — from building and testing to tear-down and rebuild — by converting manual provisioning activities into repeatable, error-free automation routines. Tivoli Provisioning Manager can help you:

Reduce costs through improved efficiency and productivity of your test lab support staff.
Decrease development time and overall time to market.
Minimize errors caused by manual resource reconfigurations and repurposing.
Improve time to market for business applications by reducing errors during testing.
Lower labor costs due to fewer fixes and less idle time for testing and development.
Avoid overprovisioning to reduce capital expenditures on software and hardware.
Help improve customer satisfaction by producing higher-quality applications with fewer errors.

Tivoli Provisioning Manager now integrates with Rational Test Lab Manager to provide more value in test environments. Rational Test Lab Manger is part of the Rational Quality Manager offering and enables development organizations to increase the utilization of their lab assets by consolidating accurate up-to-date information about the assets in the lab. Tivoli Provisioning Manager will provide an OPAL plug-in which will be used by Rational Test Lab Manager to implement two extension points: one for inventory awareness and a second for automation. The inventory awareness capability will allow Rational Test Lab Manager to pull data from Tivoli Provisioning Manager about managed systems and then create automation tasks for these systems. The automation capability will provide Rational Test Lab Manager the ability to call Tivoli Provisioning Manager to get the list of automation packages it can provide, to execute the automation workflows, and to get the results of the deployment execution. This integration will make it easier to optimize test environments by automating the provisioning process for users of Rational Test Lab Manager.

These advantages can be especially helpful in organizations that have mission-critical, internal applications that must be refreshed often and quickly to maintain a competitive edge.