Pixelpark AG

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Pixelpark's system administrators are responsible for quality assurance as well as the software build process, often providing detailed customization to meet customers' business and environment needs.

Deploying complex technology in real-life environments is a time-consuming task that takes as much as eight hours. Pixelpark was interested in reducing that expensive work time and eliminating possible errors arising from the repetitive steps involved in complicated installation and start-up operations. The company began looking for a way to automate this task. Its goal was to improve the quality of server and software installation and more importantly to guarantee uniform configuration across all servers.

"We have always had development rules, but there was no one to monitor these standards," said Uwe Bartels, system architect at Pixelpark. Additionally, each developer worked differently, for example, each saved logfiles in different locations. "If errors occurred, we first had to establish the location of the relevant logfiles before we could track down errors."

Pixelpark searched for a way to automate these tasks, and the N1 Service Provisioning System soon emerged as the proven choice. Previously, Pixelpark had positive experience with Sun's hardware and software. When the company won a contract to develop a property portal for a banking organization, they turned to the Sun N1 software to integrate the application workflow with the deployment process. The task included installing a BEA application server and a PHP web-server with supplementary batch jobs. To be successful, the solution needed to be easily deployed.

In October 2005, the final decision was made to implement provisioning of the BEA application servers and to automate the software development lifecycle with the N1 Service Provisioning System. Sun worked closely with Pixelpark to install the solution within three days. Sun also provided hands-on training and a customized workshop that quickly paid off. Two weeks after the workshop, Pixelpark's newly trained N1 system administrator had set up the company's first fully automatic BEA application server using customized installation guidelines. This included complete installation and configuration of the BEA software, importing licenses and setting up Solaris 10 Service Management Facility for automated startup and shutdown of the system.

"Once the demonstration pool for automated configuration of domain and server names has been configured and the administrator password set up, the bulk of the work is done. The rest is copying. Ten servers can be set up concurrently in eight minutes," Bartels said. If done manually, this operation would take about two days – and Bartels thinks that with increased experience, Pixelpark will be able to complete future projects even faster.

After completing the server installation, the next step was to program and deploy the applications. First, all environment-specific parameters were extracted from the Web Archive (WAR) files, leaving only the actual application code, which was then committed to the N1 Service Provisioning System repository. Because the WAR files did not need to be modified for the qualification and production environments, the build process was simplified considerably, saving half day for each development team.

With the N1 Service Provisioning System, servers can continue to operate without downtime when new releases are being installed. In addition, deployments can be performed on multiple servers in parallel. The time required to install a module is thereby reduced to one or two days.

"In the case of the BEA web application, even just one day suffices -- instead of up to five days, which is what this operation takes when executed manually," Bartels said.

The PHP web-server application was installed on a system with a cache module, which made the installation more complex. During deployment, a backup of the old release was created on the computer, Bartels explained. With ten servers, this operation took about 20 minutes if done manually, but with the N1 Service Provisioning System, it took less than 1 minute.

"Thanks to automation, operations could be reversed without a problem. This used to be considerably more difficult because we had to import old releases by hand and, due to the complexity, changes sometimes went missing," he said. The N1 Service Provisioning System software made deployment possible in conjunction with load tests – all without requiring downtime.

The N1 Service Provisioning System offered further advantages in the installation and configuration of a complex monitoring solution used by Pixelpark. In the course of the project, the company installed more than 50 such monitors, and each required additional customized settings on multiple Sun servers. Manually, this work requires ten to fifteen minutes but with the N1 Service Provisioning System, only about five minutes was needed.

"Automating this system cost us three days but because we have used the monitoring system for all projects -- certainly 300 times by now – the Sun solution has paid off here, too," Bartels said. Furthermore, he added, it could be imported in this way on Windows systems, which is "something that is otherwise possible only with a Windows GUI."

A deployment that formerly took three to four hours now takes Pixelpark only five minutes – a 97 percent time savings. Such an operation takes place twice weekly in the initial phase of every project after going online, and even more often during the test phase. With the N1 software, customers receive faster results and problems can be isolated more rapidly. In addition, system architects are relieved of routine jobs. And finally, the system’s history is documented very comprehensively "so that apparently lost data can be conveniently recovered," Bartels said.

Pixelpark's investment in the N1 Service Provisioning System was recouped within the first project. After two follow-on projects, the expenditure on the BEA installation was also paid for.

"With the new solution, we can conveniently install servers at more remote computing centers without having to transport them from place to place. That saves even more time and money," Bartels said.