Tools for promoting applications to production

[Shivkumar]

Hi All,

What are the enterprise level tools available to promote the applications
from pre-production to Production environment on Unix platform ?

Thanks,
Shiv

[Pete Randall]

I honestly don't know of any. Since way back in our mainframe days, we have always developed and implemented our own, home grown methods. Nowdays we have a rather involved script that handles the move from one server to the other, but there are shortcomings in that we trust the developer to identify what needs to be moved. It would be better if moved only source and built the object code on the production server.

It's on my todo list.


Pete

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Shiv:

It seems to me that your Change Management policies will be a factor in this and you haven't enumerated them.

The "tools" will probably be dependent upon _what_ constitutes your _application_, the size of the _what_, the nature and scope of the impact to users, etc.

Regards!

...JRF...

[OldSchool]

also going to depend on if its home-grown or commercial off-the-shelf software or custom-written and provided by third party, I'd think.

the selection of tools varies just as widely. for small, home-grown apps, something as simple as RCS combined w/ some scripting would probably be sufficient. there are also a variety of "Configuration Management" tools on the market, and each targets different areas.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Clearcase.

It is an IBM product and is used to manage development, in large environments. It can be sued to promote applications and programs into production from development.

It costs money but can do the job and runs on HP-UX.

SEP

[OldSchool]

Clearcase is certainly one of many products, and fairly widely used.

You might also try googleing "configuration management tools", "software life cycle" or perhaps "application lifecycle management".

also, the usenet newsgroup comp.software.config-mgmt might provide some useful information.....

[Shivkumar]

Sun MicroSystem has a product called N1 Service Provisioning System.
I was looking out similar to this product for deployment/provisioning.

[Mel Burslan]

HP has a product that was formerly known as Mercury IT Governance or something similar. Now, when I log into our version of this product, it says "HP Project and Portfolio Management."

It basically is a change management tracking tool along with other things. Since promote to production is a certain subset of change management, this should serve you to a certain extent. But, I found most of these tools being geared towards Windoze environments rather than unix, but since it is an HP product, you can contact them and ask for suitability to your purpose. These tools are very site and application specific. It is almost impossible to find an odd-the shelf application and using it unmodified.

Good luck

[Sivakumar MJ._1]

Shivkumar,

I collected some info in wiki.. Just have a look

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software