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Test/QA Systems are a Critical Part of Enterprise Availability

July 8, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Test/QA Systems are a Critical Part of Enterprise Availability

Test/QA Systems are a Critical Part of Enterprise Availability

“I could kiss you,” that’s what a friend blurted out to me nearly three decades ago as she ran towards me. She had dropped her reeds for her saxophone on the way to one of the biggest band competitions in our region. I didn’t know whose they were, but when I saw the pack of reeds on the seat on the bus I picked them up and took them with me to the warm-up area. Three minutes into her warm-up, her 1st reed cracked and she panicked as she reached into empty pockets for replacements. When I piped up that I had found them, she blurted out, “I could kiss you right now.”

As the VP of Customer Experience at SIOS Technology Corp. I have the unique and distinct pleasure of working with a number of enterprise customers and partners at different phases of the availability spectrum. Sometimes I have the opportunity of working with end customers for issue resolution, mitigation, and improvements. At other times our teams are actively working with partners and customers to architect and implement enterprise availability to protect their systems from downtime. A recent customer experience reminded me of something that happened nearly 30 years ago when my friend blurted out, “I could kiss you.”

My team and I were on a customer call. The call began with the usual pleasantries, introductions, and an overview of the customer’s enterprise environment. Thirty minutes into the call, things were going so well. Their architecture was solid, thoughtful, and well documented. Their team was knowledgeable, technically sound, and experienced. But then, the customer intimated that due to cost savings they would not be planning to maintain a dedicated test/quality system. I took a deep breath.  Actually it was more of an exhale like the rush of air from a gut punch. I prepared to respond, but before I could a voice broke through.  “The number one cause of downtime is lack of process,” exclaimed the Partner Rep Architect on the call with us. After a brief banter, the customer agreed to maintain a test/QA system and I nearly blurted out, “I could kiss you!”

On the front lines of many Enterprise deployments (new systems, data center migrations, and system updates) my teams in Support and Services have seen dozens of issues that could have been mediated by utilizing a test system/cluster.

A test/quality system is an invaluable part of an HA strategy to avoid downtime. Common tasks associated with maintaining an enterprise deployment such as patches, updates, and configuration changes come with risk. Enormous risk.

Commonly identified risks of testing in production include several serious and potentially catastrophic issues: 

  • Corrupted or invalid data
  • Leaked protected data
  • Incorrect revenue recognition (canceled orders, etc.)
  • Overloaded systems
  • Unintended side effects or impacts on other production systems
  • High error rates that set off alerts and page people on-call
  • Skewed analytics (traffic funnels, A/B test results, etc.)
  • Inaccurate traffic logs full of script and bot activity (a)

If a customer attempts to apply risky changes in production, the result can be quite damaging. On top of those listed above, there is an increased risk of downtime, corruption of application installations, and in some cases irreversible damage. Take the case of Customer X (a high profile SAP Enterprise shop in the manufacturing industry).

After reading a critical notice from a reputable site, the OS Administrator quickly updated his production nodes to the latest kernel update available. Within hours the Production nodes began a series of uninitiated crashes and kernel panics. In his haste, he had installed a kernel that was incompatible with his configuration; the combination of existing application packages, devices, file systems, and related packages. This caused a production outage and several high priority escalations to multiple vendors.

When patches are applied to a test/QA or sandbox system, patches and critical fixes can be managed and verified to reduce loss of productivity and unplanned downtime. Testing applications in a production-like environment allows you to identify unforeseen problems and correct the issues before they adversely impact your operations. Pre-production design and testing eliminate costly business disruption, improve your customer experience and protect your brand.

Using a test QA System to Improve Production Availability and Processes

Here are the basics that using a test/QA system, can provide for improving your production availability and processes. A controlled environment, that is similar (it must resemble production as close as possible) to the production environment, provides the ability to:

  1. Test kernel updates and security updates
  2. Validate settings and configuration tuning
  3. Reproduce production issues and test software updates and patches
  4. Verify application version compatibility and reduce the risk of downtime due to incompatible changes
  5. Provide a safe space to practice and revise go-live, maintenance, outage, and other enterprise procedural activities
  6. Train new hires and team members without impacting enterprise clients

If you have a Test/QA environment for deploying your critical enterprise availability software, I could kiss you right now. Having this environment gives your team the ability “to test, validate and verify(2)” architecture, business requirements, user scenarios, and general integration with a system or set of systems that most closely resembles the production environment- you know the one that makes the money. Of course, you will still have to schedule windows to maintain your production systems and perform testing on them as well, but after a safe buffer step has been completed in between.

— Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

————-

References:

  1. https://opensource.com/article/19/5/dont-test-production Accessed 5/4/2020
  2. https://www.softwaretestingclass.com/system-testing-what-why-how/ Accessed 5/4/2020

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: disaster recovery, High Availability, Q&A, Risks, Testing

Press Release: The Human Impact of Ensuring SQL Server High Availability in Virtual Environments Is the Featured Topic of the Next SIOS Clustering 101 Webinar Series

May 20, 2015 by sios2017

SAN MATEO, CA – May 20, 2015 – SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com), maker of SAN and #SANLess clustering software products, today announced Microsoft Clustering MVP and SIOS Senior Technical Evangelist Dave Bermingham will discuss the human impact of ensuring SQL Server high availability (HA) in virtual environments in the next session of its Clustering 101 webinar series.

Titled “Live Q&A – The Human Impact of SQL Server High Availability in Virtual Environments,” this webinar will be held on Wednesday, May 27 at 10:00 AM PDT / 1:00 PM EDT.  To register, please visit:  http://us.sios.com/2015-05-clustering101

To provide the HA protection mission critical applications require, SQL Admins may have to work closely with VM Admins. In this month’s Clustering 101 webcast, Microsoft MVP, Dave Bermingham will provide key insights to help both admin teams understand the implications of introducing HA to a SQL Server environment.

Dave Bermingham is recognized within the technology community as a high availability expert and has been honored by his peers by being elected to be a Microsoft MVP in clustering since 2010. Dave’s work as director, technical evangelist at SIOS Technology Corp. has him focused on Microsoft high availability and disaster recovery solutions as well as providing hands on support, training and professional services for cluster implementations. Dave holds numerous technical certifications and draws from more than twenty years of experience in IT, including work in the finance, healthcare and education fields, to help organizations design solutions to meet their high availability and disaster recovery needs. Learn more at http://us.sios.com

About Clustering 101

Clustering 101 is a webinar series hosted by Microsoft MVP Dave Bermingham focused on addressing the numerous facets of clustering for high availability, data replication and any combination thereof. This series will air monthly, the fourth Wednesday of the month at 10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET. Check our events page for details: http://us.sios.com/about/news-events/

About SIOS Technology Corp.

SIOS Technology Corp. makes SAN and #SANLess software solutions that make clusters easy to use and easy to own.An essential part of any cluster solution, SIOS SAN and #SANLess software provides the flexibility to build Clusters Your Way™ to protect your choice of Windows or Linux environment in any configuration (or combination) of physical, virtual and cloud (public, private, and hybrid) without sacrificing performance or availability. The unique SIOS #SANLess clustering solution allows you to configure clusters with local storage, eliminating both the cost and the single-point-of-failure risk of traditional shared (SAN) storage.

Founded in 1999, SIOS Technology Corp. (www.us.sios.com) is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and has offices throughout the United States, United Kingdom and Japan.

SIOS, SIOS Technology, SIOS DataKeeper, SIOS Protection Suite, Clusters Your Way, and associated logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of SIOS Technology Corp. and/or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

Contact:

Beth Winkowski
Winkowski Public Relations, LLC for SIOS
Phone: 978-649-7189
Email: bethwinkowski@US.SIOS.com

Filed Under: News and Events, Press Releases Tagged With: Cluster MVP, Clustering 101, MVP, Q&A, Virtual Environments, Webinar

May 27, 2015: Live Clustering 101 Webinar: Live Q&A – The Human Impact of SQL Server High Availability in Virtual Environments

May 13, 2015 by Margaret Hoagland

To provide the high availability (HA) protection your mission critical applications require, your SQL Admins may have to work closely with VM Admins . In this month’s Clustering 101 webcast, Microsoft MVP, Dave Bermingham will answer your questions and provide key insights to help understand the implications of introducing HA to your SQL Server environment for you and your admin professionals.

You can participate before the event by tweeting your questions to @SIOSTech using #Clustering101 and of course bring your own questions and comments.

Register Now

Live Q&A about High Availability in the cloud: Bring Your Questions
Date: April 29, 2014
Time: 10:00a PDT — 1:00pm EDT

About Clustering 101 Series

Clustering 101 is a webinar series hosted by Microsoft MVP, Dave Bermingham focused on addressing the numerous facets of clustering for high availability, data replication and any combination there of. This series will air monthly, the fourth Wednesday of the month at 10:00a PST / 1:00p EST.

About Dave Bermingham

David Bermingham is recognized within the technology community as a high availability expert and has been honored by his peers by being elected to be a Microsoft MVP in clustering since 2010. David’s work as director, technical evangelist at SIOS Technology Corp., has him focused on Microsoft high availability and disaster recovery solutions as well as providing hands on support, training and professional services for cluster implementations. David holds numerous technical certifications and draws from more than twenty years of experience in IT, including work in the finance, healthcare and education fields, to help organizations design solutions to meet their high availability and disaster recovery needs. Learn more at www.us.sios.com

Filed Under: Event posts, News and Events Tagged With: #SANLess Clusters for SQL Server Environments, Clustering 101, Q&A, SQLServer, Virtual Server, VMware, Webinar

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