Enlightened Testing: Speeding time to market and enhancing CX

“Testing, we will never do enough of it.” 
―Greg Lemond

There are many different types of testing. In the above quote, three-time Tour de France champion Greg Lemond is referring to dopage contrôlé— the drug testing that helps to ensure a level playing field for athletes. For the most part.

Tangentially, I truly enjoy testing. Probably not the type of testing most folks reading this are thinking about, though. More like the physical/athletic testing that helps establish training zones, fitness level, and the like. Regular testing provides timely feedback to questions like:

• Am I on pace to meet my goals?
• Am I doing enough (or too much) work?
• Am I doing the appropriate work for my goals?

In short, testing provides guidance, or a checkpoint, to help keep oneself on track and to shorten the journey to one’s goals. There’s also an element of “how do you know where the line is if you don’t try to step over it?” I’ve applied that philosophy to other areas of my life with varying degrees of success.

Testing software (databases, applications, etc.) shares some of the same benefits as athletic testing (not so much drug testing). Also, software is largely developed by humans, and humans make mistakes. That also applies to our everyday lives. When we create an asset, we send it to a peer for review, to check our work. Oracle, SAP, and MS SQL Server databases and applications greatly benefit from well-structured testing environments. You can even automate the process to make it even easier.

Appropriate software testing finds errors that are easier and less expensive to fix when they're caught early. Adequate testing also results in higher-quality applications, which results in better employee and/or customer experiences that positively affect retention.

NetApp has been accelerating software development for nearly 20 years with features native to ONTAP^® like FlexClone^®. FlexClone is a fast, space-efficient way of creating copies of applications and databases that consume very little capacity. FlexClone helps to speed and improve the quality of development, test, and other nonproduction use cases by giving each developer and user their own copy of the database or application.

Do you have a cloud presence? Great. So does NetApp. FlexClone is also a feature of Cloud Volumes ONTAP. The speedy provisioning of development, test, QA, training, and other nonproduction environments helps DevOps teams keep the business ahead of the competition and able to respond quickly to changing demands. Read Cloud cloning with FlexClone to learn how other businesses have used FlexClone and the cloud to stay ahead.

One of the many wonderful things about NetApp’s portfolio is the way that so many offerings complement each other. Are you running (or looking to run) your SAP HANA systems in the cloud? Specifically, in Microsoft Azure cloud? My compatriot Bernd Herth shows how Azure NetApp Files and Cloud Volumes ONTAP (with FlexClone volumes) together simplify and accelerate backups, DevOps, and disaster recovery in Azure.

Don’t take our word for it. Clavis Insight (now Edge by Ascential) provides online and e-commerce insights and analytics to help leading consumer packaged goods companies, such as P&G and Unilever, improve the performance of their products in the market. They are also happy NetApp FlexClone users in their development and test environments. In their previous environment, Clavis Insight development teams all used a single central database. According to Clavis, "People were stepping on each other’s toes trying to do development projects. FlexClone technology enables us to give each team their own copy of the database without any storage impact. It’s helping us speed product development dramatically, and that translates to a competitive advantage." Read the Clavis Insight story.

When you’re ready to make your life easier, do yourself a favor and see what NetApp can do for your Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft SQL Server environments in the cloud.