Development, test, and QA teams are under constant pressure to develop, test, and deploy software applications faster. And there are myriad reasons for businesses to encourage and support this continuous process improvement, as teams that achieve these efficiencies will end up with a competitive edge.
the industry standard in enterprise infrastructure,
OSIsoft—makers of the PI System, which is the industry standard in enterprise infrastructure for management of real-time data and events—found themselves with internal development and testing environments that were “bursting at the seams.” They were also in need of the ability to pull the virtual resources they needed from the company’s existing infrastructure.
After investigating their options, OSIsoft decided that a cloud-based solution was the best choice for expanding its capacity to provide virtualized IT resources. The decisionmakers at OSIsoft also knew they wanted to supplement and extend rather than completely replace their on-prem virtualization infrastructure—which led them to the hybrid cloud. We asked Tony Martinez, IT Technical Lead at OSIsoft, for his view on the hybrid cloud solution: “We definitely see the hybrid cloud model as an evolution and the best path for our success,” he said. “We will always want to keep some of our workloads private while moving other workloads to Skytap Cloud whenever it makes sense. In fact, we now evaluate any new initiative or upgrades to see if those environments should move to the public or hybrid cloud using Skytap.”
The developers at OSIsoft immediately found ways to speed up their workflow using Skytap Cloud. “Building a new system used to take two to three hours—and in some cases could take up to 16 hours. Now I can do it with Skytap in just 5 minutes.” said Dan Thompson, Technical Support Engineer at OSIsoft.
The ability to swiftly deploy, or spin up, virtual machines is also valued by the virtual training group, which facilitates training throughout the world. “We can quickly spin up the base machines for classes,” says Pablo Benvenuto, Instructional Systems Designer, Training, at OSIsoft. “In the old days everything could be on one machine. Today, as the products get more and more distributed—with a SQLServer node, PI Nodes, high availability servers, and interfaces—the number of machines required to simulate real-world customer use is always increasing. For a training exercise, having 6 machines is getting to be a minimum, which is not easily done in a repeatable or scalable fashion without products like Skytap.”
OSIsoft’s selection of Skytap Cloud to support its internal systems has provided the IT Operations teams with the control and visibility it needs to take advantage of public cloud resources, while integrating with the company’s existing private cloud infrastructure to create a complementary hybrid cloud strategy.
If you’d like to learn more about how OSIsoft uses Skytap Cloud to seamlessly access cloud-based resources, read the full case study in our resource library.
And to learn more about OSIsoft and enterprise infrastructure for management of real-time data and events, visit www.osisoft.com.
