By andra Gittlen
This savvy and veteran CTO at Automatic Data Processing,a $7 billion business-transaction-processing firm,knows virtualization holds the key.“In order to get to our utility computing vision,we need to virtualize the hardware across the board -- for storage,the network and the CPU,”he says.But before Terbush unleashes a complex virtual environment,he hopes automated change-management tools will help him simplify his physical one.
“A lot of organizations have charged down the path to deploy virtualization, but they haven’t given the same effort to how they’re going to manage it all,” says Terbush, who is also vice president of enterprise technology architecture at ADP.“The way I approach the problem is to first get a handle on the physical machines; then we can start using virtualization to add to our resources.”
ADP, in Roseland, N.J., manages payroll, benefits, human resources and other mission-critical transactions for more than 570,000 clients worldwide.“We’re always developing the next version of our software offerings,” he says.
With so much churn, keeping software-development cycles to a minimum is imperative, Terbush says. In the past, this proved difficult, because the testing process was tedious and error-prone. Developers would create products, then“toss them over the wall” to quality assurance with notes on how to recreate the test environment. Quality assurance would then do the same to the staging team and so on down the line to production, he says.
Inevitably, there were missteps along the way, and developers would have to backtrack to detect and debug changes. This backtracking was a huge time-waster and a drain on resources, Terbush says, adding that the process introduced unacceptable compliance risks, too.“Password files and registry settings were getting changed unbeknownst to the developers,” he says.
Although Terbush is eager to roll out virtualization to make it easier to replicate the environment between testing phases, more important is preparing for the added complexity that comes with putting several virtual containers on the same box, he says. So, he’s taken what he calls a significant interim step.
Over the past few years, Terbush has rolled out BladeLogic’s Operations Manager to automate change management. This multipronged tool, which manages configurations, compliance and provisioning, eliminates the need for testers to follow ad-hoc instructions. Instead, the
“…[First I] get a handle on the physical machines; then we can start using virtualization to add to our resources.” – Randy Terbush, C TO, Automatics Data Processing
automation package, which comprises an application server and agents that sit on client machines, lets developers provide uniform guidelines for recreating the test environment.As each team goes through its testing, the software packages and stores configuration changes into a repository.
To ensure compliance, IT assigns roles to each testing team and controls access via permissions.“We use the reporting feature to make sure machines are not changing and that stuff is not sneaking onto them,” he says.
Operations Manager also supports version control. Now when changes are made, all testing teams receive an alert and don’t have to detect and debug later.“We’ve cut the amount of time it takes to deploy an application into production by a factor of four,” he says.
Rolling out automated change management was relatively easy, Terbush says. Convincing the entire testing team that automation was a positive step was a bit more challenging, however.“Training is critical. People have to understand the ultimate vision of what we’re trying to do and what it means for them. It’s a culture change, and we have to help them understand the role of these new tools,” he says.
All this calculated legwork is leading up to the widespread deployment of virtualization. In a test environment, ADP is using operating system containers, as well as network and storage virtualization, Terbush says.“We ...are moving more and more to the production data center as we get a better handle on the management challenges that virtualization presents,” he says.
To that end, he adds, his team is working with BladeLogic’s new Virtualization Manager. With change management in place in the virtual environment, the team can control everything from the provisioning of virtual servers to specific configurations from a single console. But he has bigger plans than just policing server use.
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