We took a closer look at an online retailer who has recently adopted Nolio’s Zero Touch Deployment™ processes. This company employs a BigIP cluster in every one of its datacenters. In order to deploy applications to its live environment without downtime, the operator has to follow two simple steps from within Nolio’s Zero Touch Deployment™ process.

1. Query each one of the BigIP nodes for its failover state
2. Remove members from their BigIP pools selectively before upgrading the application components

As this is happening, the remaining servers in the pool continue to respond to server requests. Our new actions for virtual server failover state query and pool member management make it possible for the company’s IT operations and DevOps teams to deploy applications without any downtime!

In short, Nolio’s Zero Touch Deployment™ processes offer extended support for BigIP configuration and management. The new functionality covers getting, adding and deleting pool members as well as updating, creating and deleting iRules and querying virtual servers for their failover state.

Our latest out-of-the-box actions allow customers to include the traffic and access management capabilities of their F5 products directly into their Zero Touch Deployment™ processes, reducing manual efforts and increasing the quality and speed of the overall application release process.

Click here to learn more about Nolio’s Load Balancing Solutions

Click here to learn more about Zero Touch Deployment

Click here to view the Nolio Resource Library

Atos has 78,500 employees in 42 different countries and boasts annual revenue of EUR 8.7 billion. With its technology expertise and industry knowledge, it provides services to clients across many sectors, including manufacturing, retail, financial services, and media and technology to name a few. Partnering with Nolio, it has captured and standardized the application change and maintenance process for its customers. As a result, its clients can enjoy fast, reliable and cost-effective application deployment processes.

“By expanding our portfolio with Nolio’s platform we can better position ourselves as providers of high-quality application management services that meet the specific needs of our customers. Innovation, quality, flexibility and predictability are the most important principles. With Nolio, we can simplify the management of the most complex, heterogeneous application environments and minimize business risks.” – Marnix Harssema, Head of Portfolio Management, Benelux Atos

The bottom line is that, by adopting one comprehensive application release automation platform, Atos has managed to improve the quality, flexibility and management of its application production line. Automated processes have minimized their risk of service interruption when introducing new applications or versions and have dramatically improved Atos’ time-to-market of new products.

While Nolio has had success with Atos and other companies working in IT services, it doesn’t end there. Companies ranging from online media to SaaS, retail to banking and finance have achieved similar successes with their switch to application release automation. When will you make the switch?

Click here to view the Dutch Press Release

Click here to read more client success stories

Click here to learn more about Zero Touch Deployment™

As a leading provider of human capital management cloud solutions, Ultimate Software has an obligation to its global clients to ensure application changes are deployed accurately and efficiently. Frustrated by the limitations of Symantec Altiris’ solutions, the company conducted a thorough and robust evaluation of today’s key application deployment providers. The research led them to the conclusion that Serena, powered by Nolio, is able to offer the best automated processes on the market today.

This is not the first time that a leading global enterprise has replaced Symantec Altiris with Nolio. In August 2011, 888 Holdings choose Nolio over Altiris for an enterprise-wide license solution. Like Ultimate Software, 888 reached this decision following a thorough investigation of application release solutions.

So why does Symantec Altiris keep losing to Nolio? Ultimate Software found Altiris lacking in its application release procedures and chose Nolio due to its unsurpassed ability to manage application complexities, improve operational efficiencies and streamline deployment processes.

“We realized that existing infrastructure automation solutions, such as Altiris, can do a good job when you need to provision new servers, but when it comes to application releases and deployments, it’s a different story. We look forward to leveraging Nolio’s Release Automation solution as our unified deployments solution and ensuring the highest level of security and reliability”
Brian Goldberg, Director of Infrastructure and Deployment Strategy at Ultimate Software.

Ultimate Software discovered that it could significantly reduce its application release deployment times and operational costs by switching to Nolio ASAP. Nolio’s solutions include many unique features which enable it to continually surpass the competition. Click here to view the full list of features that Nolio offers but Symantec Altiris doesn’t.

View the full press release

Download our white paper ‘Requirements for an Application Release Automation Platform’

The 2011 HypeCycle Report is an invaluable guide for businesses and enterprises, offering an objective and practical insight into the effectiveness and value of the latest management technologies and processes. The guide empowers businesses to decide which technology innovations are worth adopting, postponing or ignoring altogether.

Application Release Automation (ARA) is named as an innovative and emerging field in this year’s report. Gartner analysts Ronni J. Colville and Donna Scott studied Nolio and other ARA providers to provide businesses with a crucial understanding of the benefits and value of these solutions.

The analyst team reported that the adoption of ARA solutions is becoming increasingly widespread – especially with large enterprises that have mission-critical websites and therefore must improve agility with as little disruption as possible. They identified five key benefits of an application release automation solution:

1. The elimination of the need to build and maintain custom scripts for application updates.
2. The reduction of configuration errors and downtime.
3. The ability to coordinate releases between people and process steps that are maintained manually in spreadsheets and/or emails.
4. The capacity to move the skill base from expensive, specialized script programmers to less costly resources.
5. The ability to increase the speed of time to market in line with agile development methodologies.

“ARA tools can eliminate the need to build and maintain time-consuming custom scripts for application updates. They can add more reliability to the deployment process with less custom scripting and by documenting variations across environments, to reduce configuration errors and downtime.  The most significant business benefit of ARA tools is that they improve the speed associated with agile development by reducing the time it takes to deploy and configure applications across all environments by creating consistent application models that improve the likelihood of successful deployments to production.”
- Gartner Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2011

Earlier this year Gartner also deemed Nolio as a ‘Cool Vendor’ in its annual report on innovative new technology providers.   It also put Nolio’s release management solutions on its shortlist of top vendors.

To deliver real-time option pricing, SuperDerivatives delivers 15 applications, operating across 100 servers, distributed over 8 global data centers. Each application requires weekly updates: content changes, new features and bug fixes.

Prior to adopting Nolio’s solution, these weekly changes involved R&D, QA and Operations and were done by executing a large number of error-prone manual service tasks. This obviously consumed a large chunk of SuperDerivatives’ web operation team’s time.

SuperDerivatives desperately needed to streamline application changes and eliminate misconfiguration errors.

Nolio’s Application Service Automation enabled SuperDerivatives to eliminate the use of scripts, affording a highly streamlined, error-free process for deploying application changes.

Matty Rosen, SuperDerivatives’ Head of Data Center Operations says, “Our customers depend on our hosted financial tools. Managing application consistency across our 8 global data centers, and our ability to reliably execute application changes in a timely manner, is therefor essential for our business.”

Rosen adds, “In addition to Nolio’s measurable productivity benefits, translating into labor cost savings, the ability to establish and enforce best practices across operations and all departments involved in application production, including R&D and QA, is Nolio’s intangible value of heightened application quality and manageability.”

SuperDerivatives experienced dramatic productivity gains once it adopted the Nolio solution for application change automation:

• Eliminating scripting reduced labor overhead from 2 days to just 30 minutes.
• Labor overhead for weekly updates has been reduced from 3 days involving 3 employees to JUST 1 HOUR.
• Labor for troubleshooting tasks has been reduced from 10 hours to 15 minutes.
• Application service auditing, not possible prior to Nolio, is now provided on demand.

Visit us at www.noliosoft.com to see how Nolio can dramatically improve your data center application operations.

As you probably know by now, relying on scripts to deploy, manage and make changes to your data center applications is highly ineffective. Scripts are prone to human errors. They place a heavy burden on operations staff to maintain them. They are costly in terms of time and significantly reduce productivity.

The only way to truly streamline data center processes is to fully automate them, and this is exactly what Nolio does. By automating data center processes, Nolio eliminates the use of scripts and provides customers with tremendous gains in efficiency and productivity.

We established this blog because we wanted a space where we could share our views on application service automation; tell you more about our exciting software; share customer success stories and more. Comments are on: please feel free to comment, to ask questions and to add your own input to anything we discuss here.