The team got back from Vegas and everyone is safe. We are now getting a chance to reach out and speak too many of you who we met at the show and man has that been exciting! We are looking forward to sharing a demonstration with you over the coming weeks. If you are interested in a demo, click here and you can sign up online!
For those of you who have not seen Swimage Encore yet, I wanted to talk about a couple of the coolest features in our product. During deployment, the beginning and the end are key inflection points. Knowing that a given target machine is ready for deployment is critical to projection of success. More often than not, deployment failures are caused by conditions that should be corrected before deployment is performed. A key component to Swimage Encore is our Validation phase. This is a process, by which the system can check a multitude of key environmental factors like disk space, availability of components (per the configuration) as well as disk health to insure the deployment that is scheduled will be successful. This phase can be run as a distinct workflow but is also run immediately before any deployment. This allows administrators to check groups of resources targeted for deployment in advance of the effort to get a sense for how successful that deployment job may be pre- execution. This process will run again as part of the “Pre-Deployment Checklist” via the workflow and make sure machines that are not ready for deployment will not be targeted. Every failure we avoid before starting is another bad review avoided and more importantly, one less dissatisfied internal customer!
Validation addresses the beginning of the deployment, but the end and execution is also very critical. In order to address that, Swimage Encore provides unparalleled status throughout the deployment process. Leveraging our live dashboards, deployment engineers can watch all activities related to a particular migration or upgrade and immediately see how things are progressing. As a drill through in the dashboard, every single step of the workflow can be investigated (and from any authenticated workspace as we are entirely web-based! Or even from your iPhone if you happen to have one. No need for a footprint or client.) The system will even echo any potential error state back to the console via a “Live Tether.” This “Live Tether” allows the engineer to see exactly the error faced on the client side, take any actions available (That would be available on the client side) as well as the ability to remotely troubleshoot from the web console. This is available at all phases of deployment (yep…even in the Preinstall Environment!). What this means is that anytime there is a problem, which we know is a rare event, your engineers will know exactly what it is and be able to remediate it from anywhere.
We are obviously very excited with the product, process and solution we have in Swimage Encore. We hope you give us the opportunity to demonstrate this via the web very soon! To tune into a webinar on Swimage Encore, click here and sign up for one of our standing demonstrations. It is time “Drink the Kool Aid” and start making new technology a true company asset rather than an encumbrance. To read more about that concept, stay tuned for an upcoming Blog about Infrastructure Optimization.