DataCore announced that Alchemy Plus is using DataCore’s
SANmelody solution to provide a hosted server virtualization farm environment
for small businesses under a “Pay as You Use” utility computing framework.
Alchemy Plus’ data center is located in Dingwall in the
Scottish Highlands. David Massey, Chief Technology Officer at Alchemy Plus,
noted, “We wanted to bring the power and efficiencies of virtualization to
smaller organizations that typically were only running a single server or a
couple of servers at most. We knew in order to succeed that we would have to
develop a model that was as cost effective as it was functionality rich, using
the principles of utility computing – a concept where the customer only pays
for what is used.”
Through this service, Alchemy Plus can provision an entire
corporate desktop environment allowing their 100+ customers to experience
reduced capital overheads, zero downtime and seamless provisioning of the
latest applications onto their environment via a robust, securely protected
Storage Area Network (SAN). Alchemy Plus selected DataCore’s SANmelody to
support the VMware applications robustly and provide flexible, centralized
storage capacity “on demand.” SANmelody fitted the bill to provide business
continuity, thin provisioning and allow for flexible, generic growth for the
companies’ eight servers (mid-range Dell servers) and 61 virtualized servers –
some of which are client dedicated, while others are shared across a fibre
channel SAN.
Massey explained. “We have grown a steady business in
providing virtualization solutions to small businesses. What we wanted to
achieve through VMware and DataCore was an optimized utility solution that
facilitated utilization of common resources (CPUs and disks) and both flexibly
and readily deployed these resources to our customers. In effect, we sought to
deliver a solution that presented applications and data in a total virtual
desktop environment to subscribing customers who remotely connect in.”
For total business continuity, accredited partner Transam
recommended that the SAN comprise two SANmelody 2.0 nodes running on Dell
PowerEdge servers in order to provide synchronous mirroring for failover and
auto recovery of clients’ business critical systems, load balancing and
disaster recovery. The results have been assuring both for the participating
companies and for the host. SANmelody’s thin provisioning capability means that
physical storage is delivered only as it is consumed. With SANmelody, Alchemy
Plus has not had to speculate up front as to how much storage has to be
allocated. Storage can be delivered on-the-fly, entirely dependant of demand,
as pre-defined volumes of storage are presented from a central storage pool to
needy applications.
In terms of testing the high availability and business
continuity of the host service, a failure that could only have been described
as catastrophic last year was handled with no disruption to clients. In fact,
Massey recounted, “There were no noticeable effects as VMware supports
multi-pathing, allowing the path to be seamlessly reverted and switched, while
SANmelody auto recovered, rebooted and was up and running within minutes
without any data loss.”
In terms of financial commitments, through SANmelody’s thin
provisioning delivered within utility computing, clients have access to 12TB of
storage from the VMware servers, while only needing to deliver physical storage
as needed. Massey knows that he can scale simply by adding extra storage to
SANmelody up to 48TB. Moreover, even beyond that, Alchemy Plus can upgrade
easily to SANsymphony. He further commented, “DataCore’s thin provisioning
allows our physical storage to scale up and out, inline with our users’ usage
and our ‘Pay as You Use’ model.”
SANmelody is part of the cornerstone of building a true
Highlands-based Alchemy Plus data center. With a naturally cooler climate than
the rest of the UK
(on average 3 degrees cooler), the Scottish Highlands are an obvious and
environmentally friendly location for companies to relocate their data centers.
It is planned to be one of Scotland’s
first Green data centers, and underpinning this will be the slim-line use of
servers and storage operating within a fully virtualized infrastructure.
In summary, Massey concluded, “This concept attractively offers
small businesses’ no capital outlay and over a 3 year total cost of ownership
we have found that our customers experience savings from 25% to in excess of
40%. Now that’s compelling!”
For a free 30-day test drive of DataCore's affordable
line of feature-packed SAN virtualization solutions, please visit: www.datacore.com/trialsoftware.
About Virtualization News Desk SYS-CON's Virtualization News Desk trawls the news sources of the world for the latest details of virtualization technologies, products, and market trends, and provides breaking news updates from the Virtualization Conference & Expo.
Kamal Mettananda wrote: Good article.
TDD is one of the ways that can be used to solve the issue of unclear requirements. Difference between what the customer wanted and what programmgers developed always has been + or -. Most of the time prorammers get confused inside all the requirements and write the code according to their knowledge.
But if the test based mindset is there, the solution gets close to the requirements. The hardest thing to achieve is to develop the correct test set. If the programmers who got confused inside requirements does this as well, then the goal will not be achieved.
William wrote: I am a 'code everything that MIGHT be needed in the next 100 years' type of programmer. To date, I have completed 1 program in the last 15 years of programming (this way).
It dawned on me that there is a better way. Having taught for several years, I taught the spiral and waterfall models. The department head hated XP programming. However from personal expierience, I have taken a hard look at my techniques and models I use. Here is what I found:
* Gather your requirements, and note dependancies.
* Do a preliminary system design. System design and future forseable changes MUST play a large part of the initial [API] design. This part of the project takes anywhere fom a couple of hours to several weeks, depending on functionality and requirements.
* Code from the user interface back, testing as you go.
This is another view of TDD. Code what is needed, not what might be. I k...
treyst1 wrote: I agree with CW: "agile development" has become a trigger-word for knee jerk reactions. At its most simple, agile software development focuses on continuous care of design: what's not to like about that?
Walter wrote: Nice article -- thoughtful comments.
My view of value of TDD is in driving the requirements to completion. Especially useful if the tests are validated by the stakeholders. However, no small number of tests, and in many cases no finite set of tests, can be a complete specificaiton. So there is always 1 more bug.
Arup wrote: The word Agile itself means being able to adapt / changes itself according to the context. The kind of methodology that should be used should depend on the project requirements, there is no one stragey suits all magic formula.
I see over the last few years we are exactly making the same kind of mistakes with XP that we did with earlier methodologies by mandating a particular way of development.
TDD however gave me another interesting benefit. I am a person who by nature has a habit of over engineering application designs. TDD helps me curb that and helps me make design which are much simpler.
Eivind Eklund wrote: The last post (talking about more work) is missing the point. It is *more code to type up front*, but the clue is to make LESS work.
I find the 2x to 3x more code than the individual methods being tested to about match my own experiences. The efficiency in refactoring and the cleanliness of the code produced, however, turn development of the same functionality into less work (if you measure in terms of development hours). It also make the code much more pleasant to work with afterwards.
Eivind
Simon wrote: Well TDD was all over TechED in the .NEt arena and built straight into the tools, hell nUnit will do it right now. So having the tools to help is a bonus in doing this kind of stuff, centrainly in MS arena. In fact in the new team system rules can be put in place so that code cant even be checked in without a valid test run.
Thing is, moving away from the technical, you mentioned that it is to help with the programmer not writing a bunch of stuff he feels is necessary so only things with a test get through.
Who do you think is writing the tests ? who is auditing the results of those tests ? just how good are the tests in the first place ?
It all sounds good, but, as usual, with pretty much any Xp method you are going to have to put in shed loads of resource to ensure not only the code is correct but the test code is to spec also, with a test for practically every function you...
Kevin wrote: Nice article - short and to the point. TDD is definitely about design. But the take-away here needs to be that some amount of design MUST be done up front (in direct contrast to what some are saying). If you don''t think about the interface (i.e. contract) that your software must provide, you can''t even begin to write your test client.
Also, on an unrelated note, I agree with what Sparky says regarding the dangers inherent in a lack of forethought.
Sparky wrote: CW: Where in my comments did I attack any abbreviations or acronyms?
I simply disgreed with the authors statements that you can start coding with only a scant amount of forethought and expect that you will be better able to satisfy all future requirements as a result of that behavior.
Nowhere did I blame his statements on any abbreviations. I happen to like abbreviations.. =8>j)
Regards,
sparky
CW wrote: I''m always amazed when those otherwise innocent abbreviations, like XP or TDD, are mentioned it brings the nay sayers out of the woodwork. Nowhere in this article did the author say, "x must be done y way". Yet when agile development is mentioned, to give background to this piece, many people lose all cogent reasoning and respond emotionally with "that type of development doesn''t work". In fact, nowhere in agile methodology is restrictive guidance documented; quite the contrary, individual developers (or teams) are supposed to TAILOR the agile FRAMEWORK to fit their needs.
This is an excellent article about perspective. Folks who construe it any other way are either managers who do nothing but embrace abbreviations and acronyms without understanding them, or the "legacy" type of people who complain about everything at work without ever offering any solutions!
Sparky wrote: Dan North''s statement that "the system you develop does exactly what it needs to do and no more.. This in turn means that it is easy to modify to make it do more things in the future" is absolutely not true in most cases. In fact, some functionality can never be retrofitted "in the future" if not taken into consideration from the ground up.
It''s a bit irresponsible to suggest that "you should just start coding and everything will eventually work itself out and fall into place." except for a relatively trivial development effort.
(Has anyone seen "The Prototype That Wouldn''t Die"? =8>\)
- sparky
Jörg wrote: Really a nice article.
I am not a XP programmer, but I am not ashame to use refactoring or unit testing where it makes sense. I think it''s good pratice to refactor code to make it both easier to understand and easier to modify.
Wayne wrote: Refactoring sounds like one of those things you can do easily; the sort of thing you do when you don''t want too much of a challenge, but you still want to do something useful to your code. The trouble is that its a bit of a bore when you need to do it. So, you tend to leave the code unfactored and it starts to become a mess. That''s where refactoring tools shine. When you see a need to refactor the tools take away the drudgery so you can concentrate on the intersting part - improving the code.
I''ve only tried refactoring tools on toy applications and I can already see that they are going to be a must have feature in my next development toolset.
Aiden wrote: Dan, thanks for the interesting article.
I basically agree with Stuart''s post, except I don''t really get which "tools" are necessary for doing refactoring or unit testing. Do you need more than a simple text editor and compiler?
Neither why it is easier to refactor due to a lack of type declarations. In my experience, the more code the compiler checks for you, the less likely you are to introduce errors.
Eivind Eklund wrote: Stuart''s idea that Test Driven Development was not feasible "years ago", due to the lack of refactoring tools. This is represent a misunderstanding. Refactoring is perfectly feasible today without tools - ASSUMING YOU USE THE RIGHT LANGUAGE. I personally mainly use a TDD style when doing development where I can do that. I can''t do it all through my day job yet, due to short-short-short (bi-hourly or similar) deadlines and complex interdependencies. I do not use any particular tools for refactoring. However, I mostly program in languages (Ruby for love, Perl for money) that does not have type declarations. This cuts my code size to between 1/2 (perl) and 1/4 (ruby), and makes refactoring much easier.
I''ll not claim to have done test driven development before it became reasonably well know (I haven''t - I have used tests, but not consistently, and not test first). I have, how...
Stuart wrote: Reading some of the above comments would make me yelp ''Ouch!'', as if someone has smacked me around the head a couple of times. (with the exception of Mr. Putman)
What most people have failed to realise is the point Dan is making, TDD is not about testing - it''s about design. Design does not have to be completed up front, refactoring should be ruthlessly done (if it isn''t broken, let''s pile up some more duplicate code, which isn''t broken), and double negatives prove a point (''An ambiguous API can not never be implemented cleanly'').
The truth of the matter is that although not a complete software development process for large scale projects, TDD will provide you with the simplest solution to your software problem. As the project grows in complexity the tests are a handy extra when it comes to refactoring at a low level. As the user changes his mind about what the software is...
Ben Kuehlhorn wrote: I agree that XP is just another development methodology.
Test Driven Development works well when the API is well defined. An ambigous API can not never be implemented cleanly. Critical design must be completed before writing a test case or line of code. The author writes a sample of code to use the API. A lot of detail must be specified for the test to make sense. Any correction or clarification needs to be fixed twice: test case and code. A lot of effort would be wasted without sufficient design.
When does testing end? Do I have to write test cases for my test cases? There is a point to just write the code from a clean, complete design.
Hal Peters wrote: Interesting article. It seems some of the concepts from the "old" Top-Down Development and Prototyping approaches have been refactored and are now called XP (Extreme Programming), ASD (Agile Software Development), GEP (Good-enough programming), GP (Guerilla Programming), or what-ever. How much these improve on more "professional" approaches is uncertain, just ask NASA about doing things quickly, cheaper, etc.
Where do USER requirements, pseudo code and decision tables fit into this "new" extremely agile way of doing things? Is Test-Driven Development (TDD) appropriate for industrial strength enterprise applications? YES! If it is managed by professional project managers and it can improve on the horrific success rate of current initiatives. It has been estimated that currently, business users are happy with our computer programming results in only 1 of 3 projects. Be honest,...
David Putman wrote: I sort of saw this article as a clean and concise description of a valuable programming technique which can be used anytime anywhere. I didn''t see any hard and fast rules, just some good, clear, general guidelines.
I know Dan mentioned that the origins of TDD were with Agile Software Development and XP but can''t see anywhere that he says you *have* to be doing these to do TDD. Ditto pair programming.
I think the previous comments missed the point about feedback, never mind the point of the article.
Chris L. wrote: I agree with the previous comment. XP/Agile could make some developer and bussiness users hyper, over excited. They think it is a silver bullet to their problems. XP/Agile are like other methodology has its pros and cons. It has been proved somewhat sucessful in small scale, isolated application/prototype. It is not practical in large/enterprise level project. It is obvious that "daily refactory" just simple won''t work if there are lots of dependencies between different systems, which are controled under different departments or different outsourcing parties. Pair programming is useful when the satuiation fits and would not gain much under some other senarios....etc... The whole list deserve its own topic.
I am just curious that why not XP/Agile advocates address its short comings and in turns it can be prompted in the right way.......
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DataCore announced that Alchemy Plus is using DataCore’s
SANmelody solution to provide a hosted server virtualization farm environment
for small businesses under a “Pay as You Use” utility computing framework. 
What's the key to team and individual developer productivity in maintaining and extending a large application? Let’s start by making the following assertions: A developer's knowledge of an application code base is likely the single biggest factor of individual productivity. Cor...
An applet, a Java program that runs in a browser, often has to access the client resources. However, the security manager prevents an applet from accessing client resources. To access client resources, the applet has to have the proper permission. With this permission the applet ...
Three-letter acronyms (TLAs) are hardly new in Information Technology: EAI, ESB, SOA, BPM, BAM, ETL, MDM; the list goes on and on. This article is about yet another three-letter acronym, EDA, which stands for Event-Driven Architecture. EDA is not a brand new technology, but rathe...
Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted...
Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Egenera CTO Pete Manca, Allen Stewart, Group Manager, Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, and Brian Duckering, Sr. Director of Products and Alliances at Symantec were the top industry executives who joined Jeremy Geelan in the ...
