SKYTAP

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Skytap do?

Skytap is the leading provider of cloud-based virtual lab solutions that enable rapid development, testing, and deployment of applications in a 100% on-demand 'virtual data center'. Skytap provides self-service provisioning of virtual environments, a powerful web-based lab management application and support for existing applications to run unchanged in the cloud.

What is Skytap Virtual Lab?

Skytap's initial offering, Skytap Virtual Lab, is an virtual lab management and automation solution available as a cloud service over the Web. Most development and QA, IT operations and training organizations see enormous value in virtual lab management, but until now have not been able to justify the combined cost of implementing a vendor solution, investing in infrastructure, and administrating a shared lab. Skytap Virtual Lab offers organizations the ability to provision a virtual lab in minutes, automate the set-up and tear-down of complex, multi-tiered environments, and better collaborate across globally distributed teams using shared virtual infrastructure.

Why would companies choose Skytap's service over investing in their own lab hardware and software?

Skytap's on-demand service has a number of advantages over on-premise hardware and software. In today's IT organizations, server sprawl and underutilized hardware are common problems that result in high cost of ownership and unnecessary administrative burden. Skytap's service enables hardware and software to be accessed on demand, so organizations have access to virtually unlimited computing capacity without the associated capital expenses, ongoing administration, and frequent wait time associated with procurement. In addition, customers pay only for what they use, resulting in much more efficient use of resources and lower costs. Furthermore, because Skytap's datacenter is virtualized and offers a shared pool of resources, it delivers greater efficiency than most organizations can typically achieve with physical hardware.

What are the benefits of Skytap's solution over other virtualization solutions?

In addition to what is offered by traditional virtualization solutions, Skytap also provides state-of-the-art virtualization capabilities such as virtual machine provisioning and workflow, job brokering and management, security, remote access, role-based access control, built-in storage management, and reporting. Organizations obtain all these capabilities immediately upon signing up for the service, without the cost and risk of implementing an in-house solution.

How is Skytap's service different from Amazon EC2 or other cloud-computing offerings?

Amazon EC2 and other cloud-computing offerings typically offer a platform that provides raw compute, storage and data transfer capacity. A customer still needs skilled development resources to build a custom solution on the platform. Skytap takes a different approach by offering complete solutions that combines virtual data center technology with an easy-to-use application layer. A Skytap user only needs a web browser to access the service and can be up and running within minutes of signing up. In addition, most cloud-computing platforms only support open-source operating systems, whereas Skytap also supports commercial operating systems such as Microsoft XP and Vista. Finally, the Skytap solution includes a number of innovations including a fully-featured virtual lab automation application, a pre-populated software library that includes major operating systems, databases, and applications, and high performance for virtualization operations such as creating virtual machine snapshots.

What does Skytap Virtual Lab cost?

Skytap Virtual Lab subscriptions start at $500/month. The subscription includes access to:
- Virtual Lab's self-service lab management application
- Pre-configured virtual machine images in the Skytap Library
- On-demand virtual infrastructure, including server, storage and networking resources

Additional capacity can be scaled up on demand for virtual machine hours, storage, and data transfer.

Which hypervisors do you support?

Skytap Virtual Lab is hypervisor agnostic and provides support for VMWare and Citrix XenServer. We are also planning to provide support for Microsoft Hyper-V in the near future.

Can I use my current virtual images in Skytap Virtual Lab?

Skytap Virtual Lab allows virtual images to be uploaded, imported, and utilized to leverage previous virtualization investments.

How does Skytap keep my environment secure?

Skytap utilizes some of the most advanced technology for Internet security available today. When you access our site using Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology protects your information using both server authentication and data encryption, ensuring that your data is safe, secure, and available only to registered users in your organization.

Skytap provides each user in your organization with a unique user name and password that must be entered each time a user logs on. Skytap issues a session "cookie" only to record encrypted authentication information for the duration of a specific session. The session "cookie" does not include either the username or password of the user. Skytap does not use "cookies" to store other confidential user and session information, but instead implements more advanced security methods based on dynamic data and encoded session IDs.

In addition, Skytap Virtual Lab is hosted in a physically secure datacenter and uses an advanced firewall, among other technologies, to prevent unauthorized access.

What are the financial benefits of utilizing Skytap Virtual Lab?

Skytap users typically experience financial benefits in 3 primary areas:

• Deferred and/or reduced capital cost: Users can easily save 50% or more over the life of their projects as they only pay for what they use and don't have to live with under-utilized, depreciating hardware and software on their balance sheets.
• Rapid lab configuration deployment: The Skytap Library™ enables users to rapidly build and deploy multi-machine configurations utilizing pre-configured and fully patched virtual images. The Skytap Library includes major operating systems, databases, and applications in multiple languages.
• Faster bug identification and resolution: Skytap's capability for instant collaboration on software issues and defects in a web-based project-oriented environment ensures global development and test organizations resolve issues as if they were in the same office. Skytap's instant snapshot functionality enables entire multi-machine environments to be suspended and shared with distributed, global team members to enable rapid reproduction, diagnosis, and resolution of software defects.

Who are Skytap's partners?

Skytap's partners include a number of industry leaders including the major hypervisor vendors (VMWare, Citrix and Microsoft) and a number of independent software providers (ISVs) and service providers. For a full list of Skytap's partners, see www.skytap.com/partners.

What is the profile of an ideal Skytap Virtual Lab customer?

The ideal prospective Skytap customer varies from small ISVs and System Integrators to large departments within global organizations. Our typical customers have both steady-state and transient lab needs. Many of our customers are already utilizing virtualization, although it is not a requirement.