Jason Schroeder's Blog

I have been working on a deployment of what has to date been generically termed 'Concept Center.'  Modeled after Sun's hugely successful iForce Centers, the idea is to provide an environment that can supplement a customer's existing development, proof of concept and testing compute resources in a self sustaining, flexible and build repeatable fashion all the while targeting increased overall utilization of some of the most sorely underused equipment out there in corporate customer land ... the development and lab equipment.

This has really been interesting for me.  It has given me the chance to build out something new and try out some previously unfamiliar (to me) software.  Good learning experience and a chance to put it all together in my own 'editorial view' of how it could be done. 

So, I put this together.  The idea is pretty simple.  Take a hodgepodge of gear, put some tools and processes in place to automate the 'checkout', 'provisioning', 'access' and 'reclaim' steps to offer this previously underutilized equipment to a greater audience for things like:

    -Short to medium term development
    -Proof of concept incubation
    -Scalability testing
    -Application certification
    -Test to function
    -Code porting

So, a sample workflow example:

    -Browse the Concept Center Portal
    -Check the Calendar for available resources
    -Select resource profiles (OS version, application stack, identities requiring access)
    -Map the requested profile to the requested target resource and provision the system from available pool
    -Add requested Identities and grant access
    -Provision application stack
    -Use to hearts content
    -Rinse
    -Repeat

All through a browser, sitting anywhere on the network.  As add ons, this environment enables access to desktop services, load generation services, flash archive store and retrieval, etc, etc.  Working on providing a grid and some expanded storage capabilties.  Fun project.

/jason