Featured Company: StackSafe
Web Site: www.stacksafe.com
Headquarters: Vienna, Virginia
Year Founded: 2005
Founder: Loren Burnett
Investors: Novak Biddle Venture Partners and Chart Venture Partners
Total Capital Raised: $7.9 Million Series A
Company News: www.stacksafe.com/index.php/Press-Releases
*Updated 5/27/08
By Loren Burnett, President and CEO
Overview
StackSafe provides software infrastructure testing solutions that enable IT operations to significantly improve uptime and resiliency. StackSafe’s flagship product, StackSafe Test Center, directly addresses incomplete and ineffective IT operations staging and testing of changes to multi-tiered software infrastructure stacks. With Test Center, StackSafe provides the first easy-to-use virtualized staging and testing solution that enables IT operations to understand the business impact of changes—before they touch production systems.
What IT problem does StackSafe Test Center address?
Simply stated, the problem is downtime and its causes. IT downtime on any scale has a negative impact on all businesses, no matter the size or industry. In today’s global economy, businesses need to be ‘always on,’ requiring 100 percent uptime of services and networks. StackSafe’s research has shown that changes to the software infrastructure are the leading cause of downtime.
Application and infrastructure change requests, in all sizes, from the large-scale and important to the miniscule and low priority, continually inundate IT operations teams. To meet these requests and maintain the level of high service availability, which businesses expect and demand, IT operations teams must remain responsive to these requests even though these changes may impact their ability to continue day-to-day operations work and cause network or application downtime. This brings about a “perfect storm” for IT operations teams: IT and infrastructure changes are necessary in every organization and grow along with business and system expansion – but in organizations with increasingly complex environments, changes often lead to significant service outages and downtime across the enterprise.
How can downtime be prevented?
Implementing a change management process as well as better IT operations testing tools and methodologies can prevent the risk of downtime. In response to this need StackSafe developed StackSafe Test Center – a new, cost-effective, automated staging and testing solution that improves availability and resiliency through enhanced software infrastructure testing. Test Center directly addresses incomplete and ineffective IT operations testing and analysis of changes to multi-tiered software infrastructure stacks.
What are Test Center’s main functionalities?
Virtualized Staging Environment
Using virtualization technology, StackSafe Test Center enables IT operations teams to create copies of the production servers that make up the software infrastructure stack and test changes on these copies. Once imported, the virtual components of the infrastructure stack safely execute and interact inside the staging environment with little or no impact on any live environments. IT operations teams can import components from physical as well as virtualized multi-tier, multi-system environments with a “single click” for each component. Although StackSafe uses virtualization to build the staging environment, the complexity associated with virtualization is handled in the background – eliminating complicated settings or configurations.
Multi-Purpose Testing
Test Center lets IT operations teams conduct testing on imported images around the clock, without requiring scheduled downtime by eliminating interaction with the production software infrastructure stacks. A variety of software infrastructure tests for status, functionality, configuration, reliability, security, connectivity, and performance are included in Test Center. Additionally, Test Center supports a user’s ability to build custom tests depending on the requirement.
Analysis and Reporting
StackSafe Test Center reporting capabilities give IT operations teams the ability to document and certify their testing work, which can feed directly into compliance, governance and oversight processes. In the past, IT could not say with confidence that a change request or service request was safe. With Test Center, change requests and proposed configurations can be tested in a safe, virtualized environment until they are either deemed safe or rejected because they will cause a failure or impact performance.
What differentiates StackSafe’s technology from others in the same space?
StackSafe is taking virtualization beyond server consolidation and has applied the technology to the pre-production testing process for IT operations. By creating a virtual copy of the infrastructure stack, Test Center enables IT operations teams to thoroughly test changes prior to implementation as well as run a series of diagnostic tests to prevent future outages. No other virtualization empowered testing solutions combines staging of production environments with pre-packaged testing and analysis for IT operations.
Is Test Center available today?
StackSafe released the first version of Test Center in January at the DEMO 08 show and is planning an upgrade to be released in Q2 2008.
What do you think about StackSafe? Leave your comments below. Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com
