Case Study
Zettaset Gains Scalability Required For
Large Hadoop Development and Test
Environments, in Skytap
» Challenges
» Zettaset is an enterprise software company and the creator of
Orchestrator™, an enterprise-ready Hadoop cluster
management solution designed for organizations that need a
more automated, efficient, and reliable way to structure and
manage big data. Orchestrator significantly improves Hadoop
cluster security, availability and performance, and is designed
to manage any Apache Hadoop distribution.
• Self-service and ease of use for dev/test teams to
Zettaset selected Skytap to gain the massive scalability it
requires to test its solutions against large Hadoop clusters,
and to take advantage of Skytap’s rapid provisioning and
management of complex environments. The move to Skytap
has saved Zettaset from expanding its on-premises VMware
infrastructure, and the ease of use has enabled it to keep its
development and testing teams focused on product
development, instead of managing infrastructure.
• Finite IT resources for dev/test environments
on-premises
• Provisioning and managing complex
environments for software testing
get environments quickly
• Manual management of network IP addressing for
on-premises and cloud resources
» Solution
Zettaset adopted Skytap to gain the scalability
required to develop and test its software solutions
across large Hadoop clusters, and to simplify
accessibility to environments for developers, test
engineers, regional sales teams,
and IT.
» Benefits
• Scalability from finite, on-premises resources to
public cloud for dev/test environments
• Time saved with rapid provisioning and scalability
for testing on large Hadoop Clusters
Situation
With big data becoming an increasingly important resource, many
organizations have supplemented or replaced their traditional data
warehouses to embrace the massive scalability of the non-relational Hadoop
system. Zettaset was founded to resolve the problems that organizations
soon face after deploying Hadoop—the lack of management and
administrative tools required by the enterprise.
Zettaset is a big data software company that provides a services
management layer on top of Hadoop distributions. In their own words,
“We make Hadoop Enterprise Ready.” An important element of making
Hadoop enterprise-ready is Orchestrator’s ability to help ensure compliance
requirements are addressed. Zettaset supplements leading Hadoop
distributions with more robust security, encryption, and authentication
services such as role-based access control and LDAP support.
It’s no surprise that big data requires big resources to support development
and testing. “Initially developing and testing on small Hadoop environments
that were no more than 3- to 4-node clusters was fine,” says Timothy
Demarest, Senior Director of Technical Operations at Zettaset. “But as the
business scaled, doing adequate testing on larger node clusters was nearly
impossible.”
• Simplified environment management across
•
application development and testing teams with
visibility and control for IT
Use of Network Address Translation (NAT) to
simplify management of complex network routes
and IP addressing in a Hybrid Cloud architecture
» Customer Highlights
“I didn’t have to ask engineering to change their
workflow,” Demarest says. “Everything that we
were doing in our own VMware environment
we can do in Skytap, only faster and better. No
changes whatsoever were required, everything
worked perfectly.”
Timothy Demarest,
Senior Director of Technical Operations, Zettaset
The need to support environment templates for consistency added to the
difficulties. “We were really struggling with sharing complex environments,
builds, and QA environments,” Demarest says. “The efficient sharing of
standardized environments was extremely challenging. We needed a better
solution to keep up with customer demand.”
Continued on next page »
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Case Study
Challenges
200% Faster Testing Using Skytap API
As the popularity of Orchestrator grew, Zettaset’s rapid success
soon created problems with scalability. The company’s twenty-five
developers and five test engineers needed the ability to simulate
larger Hadoop clusters. Initially, their development and test needs
were met by deploying an on-premises VMware infrastructure
However, as the company continued to grow, they were faced with
the need to either continue building out more capacity or find a
cloud-based solution to support their growth and needs for greater
scalability, and to support a geographically dispersed sales team with
product demo infrastructure needs.
Using the Skytap API to automate testing has proven to be a major
benefit for Zettaset, allowing it to slash the manual steps that used
to be involved and to increase their ability to perform multiple tests
in parallel.
One of the challenges the company faced was creating, self
provisioning, cloning, and sharing environments that Zettaset used
mainly for development and testing. The company deployed Amazon
Web Services resources and considered Rackspace, but found these
solutions to be too complex and difficult to use. Zettaset wanted to
keep its focus on core competencies—creating better software faster.
Solution
Zettaset chose Skytap as its solution and because of the early
successes is exploring moving more workloads from its on-premises
VMware infrastructure and AWS to Skytap. The decision came after
the company ran some experiments with Amazon Web Services,
Rackspace, and Skytap. Zettaset discovered that Skytap best met
its needs and found that the repeatability of templatized complete
environments, resource sharing, and speed of provisioning from
other providers didn’t compare with what Skytap offers. They
were looking for push-button simplicity for complex computing
environments, and found what they wanted with Skytap.
Zettaset is especially pleased with the ease with which Skytap
supports templates, and notes that no engineering was required to
integrate their existing VMware assets and workflows with Skytap.
Zettaset also takes advantage of the Skytap network address
translation (NAT) feature, which allows Zettaset to easily create
multiple parallel development and test environments without
dealing with the networking issues that commonly occur in shared
networks across hybrid cloud architectures.
Benefits
Zettaset has enjoyed a number of benefits since moving dev/
test workloads to Skytap, including instant self-service access to
environments for engineering and QA teams, sharing complex
environments easily, scalability for massive testing and easier
environment management.
“The Skytap API has been a key feature for us because its
eliminated about 90% of the manual steps to get templates
uploaded into the environment, and has allowed us to move more
and more automated testing from our data center into Skytap,”
Demarest says. “This has allowed us to test multiple releases
simultaneously.”
Slashing the need for manual steps and gaining the ability to test
different builds concurrently has had a big impact on productivity.
“Previously these steps were very manual and we could only
test different releases serially,” Demarest says. “We’ve been able
to test builds with results close to 200% improvement in time to
completion.”
Scalability for Massive Testing
Skytap gives Zettaset the scalability it requires for testing Hadoop
solutions. “We used to be limited to working with 3 to 4 node
clusters,” Demarest says. “Using Skytap we can now test our product
on 50-node clusters, and go even higher if ever needed. This
scalability is awesome, and it is something we couldn’t have done
effectively with our current VMware on-premises datacenter.”
Easier Environment Management
Prior to working with Skytap, environment management was
an ongoing challenge for Zettaset, particularly as its sales force
expanded to keep up with market demand for its products. “Our
sales team had a standardized environment for demonstrations
and evaluations,” Demarest says. “But as our sales team grew,
maintaining these different environments on-premises was taxing.
Skytap alleviates that all together.”
Development and test experienced similar problems. The groups
began using OVA files and would pass environment templates
around using USB drives. But the company faced an ongoing
challenge of maintaining consistency over users and time. “With
Skytap we have templates of multiple environment configurations
that match different builds,” Demarest says. “Having everyone
working from the same base templates for our workloads and test
environments has been huge.”
Continued on next page »
Case Study
Simplicity of Deployment and Use
Zettaset values the ease with which they’ve been able to move
workloads to Skytap and seamlessly use the resources. “I didn’t
have to ask engineering to change their workflow,” Demarest says.
“Everything that we were doing in our own VMware environment we
can do in Skytap, only faster and better. No changes whatsoever were
required, everything worked perfectly.”
The ease of use is especially important to a company like Zettaset
with a sharp focus on product development. “Our [technical
operations] department is very small so we don’t have a lot of people
to help automate the provisioning of environments,” Demarest says.
“To off-load these concerns and leverage a solution like Skytap,
allows us to concentrate on releasing software faster and selling a
better product.”
Use of NAT to Simplify Network Addressing
Zettaset was relieved to be able to take advantage of Skytap NAT
services. “The Skytap NAT feature eliminates the need for us to
manually manage network routes and IP addressing,” Demarest says.
“This allows Zettaset to easily create multiple parallel development
and test environments without dealing with the networking issues
that commonly occur in shared networks across hybrid cloud
architectures.”
» Customer Highlights
“The Skytap NAT feature eliminates the need
for us to manually manage network routes and
IP addressing. This allows Zettaset to easily
create multiple parallel development and test
environments without dealing with the networking
issues that commonly occur in shared networks
across hybrid cloud architectures.”
Timothy Demarest,
Senior Director of Technical Operations, Zettaset
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