Start-up Akimbi Systems says it has the answer for IT shops looking to reduce the headaches involved with setting up multiple test environments for complex software development efforts.
The company, founded in 2004 by executives from Ensim, a virtualization and Web hosting firm, on Monday is expected to introduce its Slingshot capture-and-restore system. Slingshot is built on virtualization technology from VMware and Microsoft. It is aimed at letting end users quickly set up, tear down and store distributed software configurations for test and development and quality assurance.
As software development becomes more complex — moving from single-system environments to Web-based distributed applications — companies are turning to virtualization technology to reduce hardware costs associated with setting up physical environments for each test scenario.
But the number of virtualized test environments has become difficult to manage with today’s test and development tools from vendors such as IBM and Mercury Interactive, Akimbi executives say.
“The problem is because of the increasingly complex nature of software, gaps have opened up,” says James Phillips, Akimbi’s co-founder and CEO.
For example, in many cases IT has to manually set up multiple system configurations for testers, which can take hours or even days. And when a tester finds a bug, it’s nearly impossible for developers to recreate the identical software environment to fix it.
Using server virtualization technology as its base, Slingshot configures, stores and manages multi-machine software environments. The Slingshot software is deployed on any x86 system and then is used to manage a pool of servers dedicated to test and development and quality assurance. Developers and testers interact with Slingshot via a Web browser.
Users direct Slingshot to configure certain environments, which are then automatically deployed in virtual machines on appropriate servers within the pool of resources. Users also can save “live” software configurations to a storage library for later use.
While end users have been using virtualization for test environments for some time, having software designed specifically for testing demands is unique, says Carey Schwaber, an analyst at Forrester Research.
“Akimbi is the only company I know of that does pure test environment virtualization,” she says. “They have specific functionality for testing, such as making it easy to manage a lot of different images … and being able to capture the state of a virtual environment at the point at which a defect is found, then package it and share it.”
The challenge for Akimbi will be integrating its tool into packages from third-party vendors such as Mercury Interactive, Schwaber says.
Slingshot is available now and priced starting at $20,000 for a 10-server resource pool. A two-server resource pool version is priced below $1,000 for a limited time, Phillips says.
