So how do you test your cloud infrastructure?
One interesting phenomena of the move to cloud services is the change in the way that IT looks at business processes. It used to be that nothing got rolled out to production environments until IT was able to proof-of-concept the new service and test the way the implementation was going to work
But with cloud services both the providers and the users are in a bit of a crunch; neither side knows what will be happening 100% of the time, nor it is even possible to project overall infrastructure behavior as a service provider, unless you deliberately underutilize the infrastructure being offered.
And that isn't practical for a provider. Overbuilding your infrastructure to support far more than your current level of services is incredibly difficult to justify from a capital investment perspective. Having an infrastructure that can be rapidly expanded and upgraded makes far more sense, but how exactly do you determine what the capabilities of your infrastructure are?
That's one of the questions that Ixia wants to help providers answer with their cloud services validation testing services and tools that they plan to showcase at next week's Interop. Their testing enables the validation of:
- Virtual Infrastructure
- Storage Infrastructure
- Switching Fabric
- Security
- Application delivery
The key here is that the while testing any single component of your cloud infrastructure can usually be tested without too much trouble, testing the component interactions under a variety of loads and conditions is quite difficult. Ixia feels that using their services to validate your ability as a provider to deliver services is a major value add for multi-tenant environments, and the best way to effectively deploy and monetize a cloud services environment.