One of the more difficult challenges that an IT department faces is releasing a new or updated application into the wild. Placing an application into production requires a lot of time and money invested in order to ensure that everything plays well together. Leveraging virtualization is a great way to sandbox your environment and therefore it becomes a key enabler technology for staging or pre-production testing One of the more difficult challenges that an IT department faces is releasing a new or updated application into the wild. Placing an application into production requires a lot of time and money invested in order to ensure that everything plays well together. Leveraging virtualization is a great way to sandbox your environment and therefore it becomes a key enabler technology for staging or pre-production testing.StackSafe wants to assist with pre-production staging and testing, and to do that, it has announced their solution to help with this very issue – StackSafe Test Center. And the company was recently named one of the InfoWorld’s Top 10 Tech Startups for 2008. According to the company, the solution creates a virtual copy of the software infrastructure stack and enables IT Operations teams to better test the impact of changes before releasing them to the production environment, reducing the uncertainty and downtime related to IT changes. With this upgrade, the virtualized Test Center environment can be extended to interact with non-virtualized system components that reside outside of the Test Center environment – enabling test scenarios across the entire end-to-end IT service.“After releasing Test Center earlier this year, we moved quickly to support external connectivity because it enables customers to test against elements that could not be virtualized due to complexity or access such as large storage databases and distributed infrastructure components,” said Loren Burnett, president and CEO of StackSafe. “By accommodating extended infrastructure in the testing process, this updated version enables us to better deliver on our promise of reduced downtime and more effective change and release management.” The addition of external infrastructure connectivity adds the following key features to the product: Enabling inbound connectivity from external infrastructure components and services into Test Center Enabling outbound connectivity from Test Center to external infrastructure components and services Customized control of connectivity options StackSafe isn’t alone in trying to create an environment for testing and development or staging of pre-production. VMware has recently announced a number of applications to try and remedy this issue for users of its VMware ESX product. Other companies include Scalent, Surgient, Skytap and VMLogix.The problem is real, and companies are attempting to address the issue. And thankfully, technologies like virtualization are making it a much easier pill to swallow. Software Development