The Need for a Cloud Testing Lab
Skytap touts its cloud-based IT lab - which is built on enterprise-grade VMware infrastructure - as the only option that can run and test Windows 7 in the cloud. Skytap hopes to appeal to companies both small and large.
Skytap CEO Scott Roza says the company's cloud service is focused on lab testing because at many companies, labs are underserved by the IT department, yet they often take up 20 or 30 percent of a company's IT budget.
"Labs are very dynamic," Roza says. "So you can be in a test cycle where you don't have enough resources or you're not in a test cycle and you have too many resources. For that reason we thought it was a good area to build a specialty cloud for IT lab testing."
Roza refers to Skytap's service as a "hybrid" cloud platform, where the cloud is not an island but an extension of the in-house physical lab. Users have the flexibility to import VMWare images into the cloud via a secure VPN tunnel and export them back to their physical in-house lab.
As for Skytap's competition, other well-known cloud platforms such as Amazon's EC2 service and Microsoft's upcoming cloud OS Windows Azure, to be launched commercially in November, have disadvantages for Windows 7 testing compared to the Skytap arrangement, Roza says.
"EC 2 is powerful, but it's a platform for small Web businesses; it's not used in the enterprise," says Roza. "It's not compatible with VMware, which is in 85 percent of enterprises. If you want to import and export virtual machines, Amazon is not a great fit for you."
As for Microsoft's Windows Azure, that would only fit into the plans of companies that are running Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization software, Roza says.
"But, again, most companies are using VMware," he says.
Windows 7 in Minutes, Not Days
The bottom line for Ellie Mae's Yun: Skytap's cloud-based lab makes his QA lab almost a maintenance-free environment.
The only downside for testing in the cloud is the lack of control over what hardware is being used, Yun says. "I make the assumption that Skytap keeps their data center hardware current, but I don't know things such as CPU speed or a disk's RPMs."
But, Yun says, he'll take that marginal risk over testing Windows 7 on the machines in his physical lab at Ellie Mae's headquarters, something for which he just doesn't have the time and resources.
Having access to Skytap VM machines has allowed Yun's QA team to create, configure and deploy a Windows 7 system in minutes rather than days or weeks.
"The productivity gained can be measured in the thousands of dollars," he says.
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