The transition from development to production is a risky one. Distributed applications that look good on the developer's bench often under-perform in the production environment. Even apparently innocuous changes to an application can cause big problems when they're introduced into production. These snafus delay time-to-benefit, force costly eleventh-hour coding and infrastructure changes, and undermine IT's credibility.

This transition is so risky because the development environment does not adequately take into account the distributed nature of the enterprise environment. In the real world, services are delivered to geographically dispersed end-users across a complex enterprise environment. The specific nature of this environment - including the number, behavior and distribution of end-users - therefore has a direct impact on application performance. Companies often attempt to ensure the performance of distributed applications in the real-world production environment by over-provisioning capacity or investing in various infrastructure enhancements. But these expenditures don't always prevent performance problems or produce worthwhile performance improvements. So precious IT dollars wind up wasted and performance problems remain.

A smarter approach is to pro-actively model the behavior of distributed applications in the real world throughout the project lifecycle. Applied from early development and QA through pre-deployment readiness testing and ongoing production management, this best practice ensures that target service levels are met reliably, consistently and efficiently.

The Shunra Virtual Enterprise uniquely supports this critical best practice. It provides a precise replica of the production environment - including remote offices, remote users and the delivery system that connects them. By applying the Shunra Virtual Enterprise throughout the project lifecycle, IT can find and resolve application performance problems before - not after - they are launched into production. They can better perform key lifecycle management tasks such as capacity planning, troubleshooting, impact analysis and the validation of proposed infrastructure investments. In other words, they can take the risk out of delivering distributed applications across the enterprise.

The Shunra Virtual Enterprise can be effectively applied to all types of distributed applications, including commercial ERP/CRM/SCM, eCommerce and custom development projects. It can support and rationalize initiatives such as data">http://www.shunra.com/content.aspx?pageId=4">data center consolidation, SAN/NAS implementations and disaster recovery. And it can ensure the successful introduction of new technologies such as VoIP, video conferencing and Web Services into the enterprise.

As technological complexity continues to grow - and as the stakes of the game continue to rise - IT must eliminate risk from the delivery of distributed applications. No one should have to cross their fingers when they flip the switch on a new service or infrastructure modification. With the Shunra Virtual Enterprise, they don't have to.

To learn more, visit http://www.shunra.com">http://www.shunra.com">http://www.shunra.com. Shunra empowers enterprise organizations and technology vendors to eliminate the risks associated with rolling out complex, distributed, applications and services. The Shunra Virtual Enterprise (Shunra VE) solution provides accurate, highly granular insight into how networked">http://www.shunra.com">networked applications will function, perform and scale for remote end-users. It creates an exact replica of the production network environment, allowing users to safely develop, test and experiment with applications and infrastructure in a lab environment before deployment in production.

Amichai Lesser Bio

Amichai Lesser is the director of product marketing at Shunra Software, a company that delivers award-winning solutions that recreate a replica of any production network environment for testing the functionality, robustness, performance and scalability of applications and services - before rollout.

This article is copyrighted by Shunra. It may not be reproduced in whole or in part and may not be posted on other websites without the express written permission of the author who may be contacted via email at shunra@digitalbrandexpre ssions.com.



About the author:

Amichai Lesser is the director of product marketing at Shunra Software, a company that delivers award-winning solutions that recreate a replica of any production network environment for testing the functionality, robustness, performance and scalability of applications and services - before rollout.

This article is copyrighted by Shunra. It may not be reproduced in whole or in part and may not be posted on other websites without the express wri