HCL Expands Cloud Choices with a Comprehensive Guide to Azure Deployment

HCL Compass is quite a powerful tool to accelerate project delivery and increase developer productivity. Last August I detailed a webinar about HCL Compass that will help you understand the benefits and impact of a tool like this. This technology falls into the category of DevOps, which aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. Scalability across the enterprise is a key factor for success here, so cloud migration is definitely a consideration. Recently, I detailed how HCL is assisting its users to get to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Vendor choice is definitely a good thing. I’m happy to report that HCL expands cloud choices with a comprehensive guide to Azure deployment.

Microsoft Azure, commonly referred to simply as Azure is a major force in cloud computing. Moving any enterprise application to the cloud provides significant benefits, including:

• Lower costs
• Increased agility
• Reliable global delivery

There are some specific impacts that HCL’s migration guide cites (a link is coming). Some of these are worth repeating:

• Cost effectiveness: VMs (virtual machines) deployed in the cloud remove the capital expense of procuring and maintaining equipment as well as the expense of maintaining an on-premises data center. These VMs can host instances of HCL Compass
• Scalability: Estimating data center capacity requirements is very difficult. Over-estimation leads to wasted money and idle resources. Under-estimation degrades the business’s ability to be responsive. Cloud computing resources can easily and quickly be scaled up or down to meet demand. Of particular interest regarding this point, Azure provides autoscaling that automatically increases or decreases the number of VM instances as needed
• Availability: Azure, like other cloud providers, invests in redundant infrastructure, UPS systems, environmental controls, network carriers, power sources, etc. to ensure maximum uptime. Most enterprises simply cannot afford this kind of scale

The guide from HCL provides everything you need to plan your HCL Compass deployment or migration in Azure. There’s a lot of items to consider, so having all this in one place is very useful. Here are just a few of the considerations that are addressed in the HCL guide:

Supported database platforms: Ensuring you are using the correct version of the required database software is key. Versions between on-premises and the cloud are discussed, along with recommendations on how to utilize an on-premises database for a cloud deployment. This latter discussion supports a hybrid environment.

Accessing the data: For a cloud deployment, the preferred method of data access is to utilize the HCL Compass web client. The specific browsers and versions to use are specified, along with the cautions and pitfalls of other approaches.

Requisite software: Along with Linux database versions, the required versions for installation software, Java, Windows and Linux are discussed.

Many other topics are explained in detail, including:

• Performance and performance monitoring
• Cross-server communication
• Load balancing
• SSL enablement
• Single sign-on implementation
• LDAP authentication
• Multi-site implementation
• EmailRelay considerations

A detailed discussion of migration considerations is also presented, along with sample implementation scenarios. One scenario treats HCL Compass and the database in Azure. The other treats HCL Compass in Azure with the database on-premises. All-in-all, this guide provides a complete roadmap to implement HCL Compass in Azure. I can tell you from first-hand experience that cloud migration can be challenging. Software is provisioned and managed differently in a cloud environment. As long as you understand those nuances, things go smoothly.

The migration guide provided by HCL helps you discover all those nuances. You can get your copy of this valuable guide here. Download it now and find out how HCL expands cloud choices with a comprehensive guide to Azure deployment.

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