Appliance Deployment Featured Article

Want one sure way to drive up your administration and maintenance costs? Maintain separate application lifecycle management environments for different appliance deployment platforms.

According to Dave West’s Forrester Research (News - Alert) article, entitled “The Time Is Right For ALM 2.0+,” as cited in a recent NEI blog post, “…As the value and importance of software delivery increases, the importance of applying business management to the discipline of software also grows.”

So what you want, obviously, is ALM discipline that’s easy to manage. Can you get that? You can, yes, and it all starts in the early design and development phases with what the NEI (News - Alert) blog calls “a firm understanding of the application, its dependence on ecosystem software and hardware components, and how you plan to patch the OS and update the app over its lifecycle.”

In essence, what you need to do to is to sustain high availability, NEI devotes a considerable amount of explanation to that.

An ISV generally needs to monitor the health of the platform – and we’re talking about both hardware and software platforms. It needs to deliver OS patches, update on the fly, schedule backups and restore field deployed units.

You’re already doing these? Great. Manually? Uh-oh. As the blog points out, “If you do these tasks manually, you are throwing money away.” It recommends working with an integration partner to automate the process and delivery of these functions with the best ones allowing you to distribute secure, authorized updates ubiquitously across mixed physical, virtual and cloud-based appliances.

What you get out of these efforts will be tools that can be deployed and remotely monitored to ensure system health and uptime. OS patches and application updates are installed securely and quickly deployed, with the added benefit of reducing support resources over time.

And hey – done right, or “if you select the right platform integration and ALM partner,” in NEI’s words, “you can likely reduce time to market and gain a competitive edge.”