Data glut is the problem. Data agility is the solution

Data Agility feels like

photo by jasephotos

Data glut data feels like

photo by Christophe Pfeilstücker

There is a problem in the IT industry: the problem of data.  More precisely the problem is lack of data agility. Data agility means getting the right data to the right people at the right time. Data is the lifeblood of the applications that companies depend on to generate revenue. Data has to be pumped across project environments from production to development to QA to UAT.

A typical production database incurs a triple data copying tax. Data, ie copies of that production database, have to be pumped off to

1. Reporting and analytics databases

2. Development, QA and UAT environments

3. Backup

The backup portion alone is enough to saturate IT infrastructure on weekends or nightly jobs. When nightly and/or weekend job windows are not an option at global corporations running 24×7 when and how can data be pumped across the IT infrastructure?

Only with this life blood can applications run and can development projects  move forward. Without the life blood of data, applications productivity  falls off  and development projects start failing.

A lot of people think they understand the data problem but let’s go through what we’ve seen with customers in the industry

1. 96% of QA cycle time spent waiting on data for QA environments

2. 95% data storage spent on duplicate data

3. 90% of developer lost time is due to waiting for data in development environments

4. 50% of DBA time spent making database copies

5. 20% of bugs of production bugs slipping in because of using subsets in development and QA

The above metrics come from companies who took the time to quantify these measurements. Do you have metrics to show your operational expenses and results?  If you can’t measure it then you can manage it

You can’t mange what you don’t measure.

Questions:

1. How many copies of databases are in your IT department?
   

2. Which groups have copies?

3. How long does it take to provision a copy of a database?

4. How often does development need copies of database provisioned?

5. How much of your storage is due to duplicate database copies?

6. How long does it take QA to build an environment?
   

7. Are the QA suites destructive?

8. Do QA environments have to be rebuilt after each QA test cycle?

9. Are these environments rolled back? refreshed?

Can you answer these basic metrics?

We are seeing the following issues eating away at the revenue of companies we are talking to:

1. Delays
   

2. Slow environment build times cause project delays

3. Sharing copies causes programming bottlenecks, delaying coders

4. QA can’t run multiple tests in parallel, delaying QA

5. Bugs
   

6. Subset databases in dev and QA allow  bugs to slip into production

7. Slow QA environment builds allow more dependent code to be written on top of bugs before the bugs are found

8. Lack of QA environments and QA testing allowing more bugs  into production

9. Costs
   

10. Storage cost of storage ownership. Storage is cheap. Managing storage is expensive.

11. DBA team time. DBA teams spending 50% of their time building database copies.

12. Higher development costs due lost developer days as developers wait for development environments

CIO magazine recently surveyed CIOs and found that on average CIOs had 46 projects yet 28 of them were behind schedule and/or over budget.  That’s 60% of projects over budget and/or over schedule and of those 85% were delayed because of data and environment provisioning delays.

“Database environments are constantly getting bigger and bigger, and they’re increasingly the bottleneck,” said Tim Campos, CIO of Facebook. “If you have multiple projects going on, you have multiple copies of an environment you need to maintain. What ends up happening is you get an absolute sprawl in the database environment. Scaling that is particularly expensive for IT organizations. We have high expectations about how quickly new initiatives are rolled out and needed new technology to facilitate rollouts and support more projects simultaneously. With database virtualization, we get better use of hardware and our people. It can accelerate our enterprise application development projects significantly in the same time frame.”

Delphix reduces delays, bugs and costs. That’s why global industry leaders in all domains are turning to Delphix to accelerate their application development, transform their QA processes and eliminate thousands hours of DBA time , sysadmin, storage admin and management time that was previously required to deploy database copies and can now be done in minutes.

With Delphix

1. Companies have doubled or more development team output

2. QA has gone from 4% efficiency to 99% efficiency

3. DBA’s have gone from 8000 hours/year of database copying to 8 hours

Delphix  accelerates application releases  driving revenue growth while driving costs down.

“The most powerful thing that organization can do is to enable  development and testing to get environments when they need them”

– Gene Kim, author of the Phoenix Project

gif by Steve Karam