Does your AIX/Unix Dev/Test environment need a SLA?
Moving Dev/Test workloads to cloud/hosted environments are often the first step for organisations when considering cloud or off premise hosted deployments. The major Public Clouds started attracting workloads in this way with support being on an ‘as is’ or ‘reasonable efforts’ basis. L3C, a specialist UK AIX/Unix service provider offers flexible and realistic Service Level Agreements (SLAs) even for such environments but why would you need an SLA for Dev/Test?
Firstly, Dev/Test projects are well planned and can often involve co-ordinating developers from multiple locations across time-zones in sprints or specifically scheduled tasks. With such resources being co-ordinated and scheduled to test activities availability beyond 9-5 is key. Earlier this year one of our clients had called in multiple developers from numerous locations for a specific activity to begin at 10pm GMT. A slight network configuration glitch halted everything yet a quick call to our 24×7 service desk resolved the issue in minutes and work could continue as planned. I was later told that this saved them 3 weeks in elapsed time as it would have taken that long to reschedule everyone.
Secondly the Dev/Test team is often made up from internal and external resources. Large organisations may have an internal project leader but the actual Dev/Test team may consist of resources from a System Integrator or ISV. A delay can easily have a knock on effect on the wider transformation project as well as the costs incurred in re-securing any external teams. (Similarly from the point of view of the System Integrator they may be on a fixed timescale to complete the project and may face penalties if late).
Also consider when performing UAT. By definition users are testing the new process or application so surely the underlying infrastructure should be operating in a fully supported mode?
If you would like to discuss a cost effective and flexible Dev/Test environment with SLAs that support your needs for your AIX, Solaris, HP-UX or Linux environments then contact us via our website www.l3c.cloud or our LinkedIn page L3C LTD.
