Cloud Testing Comes to the Fore

Computer Sciences on Oct. 20 announced a partnership with SOASTA, a provider of cloud testing environments, in which CSC will "integrate SOASTA CloudTest into CSC's Trusted Cloud Services and testing and development methodology," the company said in a news release.

"Web application performance testing in CSC's Trusted Cloud uses SOASTA CloudTest to leverage the elasticity of the cloud to provide an accurate representation of real-world Web traffic and usage," CSC said.

"We are pleased to partner with SOASTA," Brian Boruff, vice president of Cloud Computing for CSC, said in the statement. "The company's technical achievements leveraging the cloud are impressive, as is their clear commitment to ensuring partner success. Our customers depend on us to provide the very best technology. Web application performance is a crucial aspect of our customers' success. SOASTA's cloud-testing product line helps us satisfy their needs as well as continue to expand our cloud services offering with a powerful and affordable solution."

According to the release:

"SOASTA CloudTest provides load and performance testing solutions to ensure Web applications and services perform in a highly reliable, scalable and predictable manner. CSC offers Independent Testing and Validation Services across industry verticals, leveraging its deep domain expertise, global delivery capability and comprehensive portfolio of testing services. CSC also provides "Testing as a Service" (TaaS) within its Trusted Cloud Services offering. Testing as a Service is available on-demand in public, private and hybrid cloud networks to meet customers' business requirements, security needs and regulatory standards."

It continued:

"By combining CSC's global testing services capabilities with SOASTA's leading cloud testing solution, CSC provides a complete set of testing and accreditation services to all customers globally. The offering will focus on new cloud computing and Web projects as well as provide existing managed services customers with a new level of performance and reliability not previously possible due to hardware, software and human resource limitations."

"We are very excited to have CSC as a partner and grow our presence in the global market," said Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA. "CSC has established strong business relationships with customers across a broad range of industries, an outstanding professional services organization and a commitment to [ensuring] customer success. By leveraging the cloud, CSC customers will be able to launch their Web applications with confidence in their ability to perform as expected."

"Website performance impacts any enterprise that is marketing, selling or processing business using the Web, and yet most companies do not test for Web application reliability and examples of performance issues abound," said Ben Pring, vice president of research at Gartner. "It has been cost-prohibitive to simulate real-world traffic using traditional testing methods. With cloud-based testing, enterprises of all sizes can now affordably test to identify performance issues and validate Website reliability."

Meanwhile, also in the Web performance testing arena, Zeus Technology, which provides pure software-based application traffic management, announced on Oct. 20 the introduction of Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0. "The release will help ensure [that] enterprise Web applications are always fast and available even during peaks in demand—across physical, virtual and cloud IT environments," the company said in its announcement.

"The rapid adoption of virtualization and cloud computing, coupled with rising expectations for more dynamic and available Web applications, presents new challenges for the IT department," said Paul Brennan, CEO of Zeus Technology. "The latest release from Zeus will enable businesses to cope with the massive growth in the demand for Web services, which is putting huge demands on Web infrastructures. Zeus Traffic Manager 6.0 will allow companies to see, manage and control their applications across any IT environment, ensuring [that] they are online all the time." According to the release:

"New features include:

·   Multi-hosted IP addresses to scale clusters more easily

·   Command Line Interface to manage clusters more effectively

·  Solid State Disk caching to improve performance by caching more content

·   Detailed traffic diagnostics to visualize and debug traffic applications

·   Integration with enterprise authentication for streamlined administration

·   Geolocation technology to create location-sensitive traffic management policies

·   Available on any physical, virtual or cloud platform including Linux, Solaris, VMware, Xen, Oracle and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

·   New Virtual Appliances for Xen and Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Amazon Web Services"

Zeus also announced Oct. 20 that in a survey of CIOs, IT directors and senior IT managers in the United States and the United Kingdom, Zeus found that nearly 75 percent of CIOs said they already use or plan to use cloud computing, but only 27 percent have a solution in place to manage it.

Indeed, "The survey found that, while adoption is increasing, CIOs are concerned about how to manage and control applications and resources in cloud environments. More than half worry about a lack of cost control (57 percent) and more than a third (35 percent) fret over scalability," Zeus said. But the biggest concern is being locked in to one vendor for cloud services, according to 63 percent of organizations surveyed.