Home >> White Papers >> Cutting Software Development Time

Cutting Software Development Time

FlashDisk OpenRAID
Investment vs. Return on Investment

Return-On-Investment (ROI) is clear in this example. A $20,000 investment produces $100,000 return in one year and a $300,000 return in three years. The investment payback period is just 10 weeks. In three years, the investment is repaid 15 times. The chart shows how much of the return is derived from increased productivity, profit enhancement and higher system availability.

Software development projects, due to their high engineering labor content as well as profit and revenue sensitivity, typically pay back their investments exceptionally fast. As in this example, often in several weeks or a couple of months-not years-required by most capital equipment investments. Think about it. In just 10 weeks the investment is repaid and the equipment was then essentially free. In the next 10 weeks it pays for itself again and by the end of the year the $20,000 investment was repaid five times for a net profit of $80,000. Over three years, there will be $300,000 return on a $20,000 investment resulting in a $280,000 net gain. Few, if any, other capital investments offer this rate of return and thus it is generally very easy to obtain management and financial approval for equipment investments that speed software development. A request for equipment that speeds software development may in fact be the best payback investment that the CFO in your organization will have the pleasure to review this year.

Scalability

For very large projects involving hundreds of developers, terabytes of storage, dozens of servers, numerous projects and multiple VOBs for each project, FlashDisk OpenRAID solutions easily scale to meet the most stringent, demanding and critical requirements. Each FlashDisk OpenRAID unit provides a complete and separate increment of performance and storage and thus performance scales linearly with each extra unit. Up to nine units can be housed in an 82" high data center cabinet to support up to 36 servers simultaneously delivering up to a cumulative 117,000 disk operations per second. The data center cabinet can store up to 13 TB in just six square feet of floor space.

Summary

Winchester Systems is a Rational Unified Partner that offers its high performance FlashDisk OpenRAID disk array that speeds software development for Rational Software customers. Performance tests of Rational ClearCase "merge" and "build" functions with high performance FlashDisk arrays demonstrate substantial and material increases in performance of this popular version control software. These speed improvements translate directly into time saved in the software development process. Since shorter development cycles means higher quality software sooner, organizations that utilize FlashDisk ultra-high performance data storage to speed their development will enjoy shorter development cycles, reduced software development costs, higher reliability development environments and increased revenue from bringing software enhancements to market sooner. Faster time to market also creates a strategic and lasting competitive advantage.

These easily observable, measurable, tangible and substantial financial results make FlashDisk OpenRAID an easy justification to management since investment payback is measured in weeks rather than years.

About the Rational Unified Partner Program

Rational Software Corporation provides a platform for software development that speeds time-to-market while improving software quality. This integrated, full-lifecycle solution combines software engineering best practices, market-leading tools, and professional services to help organizations develop and deploy software. The Rational Unified Partner Program supports over 500 participating partners with tools, joint marketing opportunities, qualifications and training, to round out this open platform. The Rational Unified Partner Program ensures that our partner products and services meet the high standards that customers have come to expect from Rational. Companies and individual technology consultants interested in learning more about the Rational Unified Partner Program, including details on how to participate, can visit www.rational.com.

About Winchester Systems

Winchester Systems provides SAN and NAS capable enterprise storage solutions including high performance SCSI and fibre channel RAID disk arrays, solid-state disks, tape backup devices and other high performance commercial and military grade storage for mid-range servers including UNIX and NT. Winchester Systems provides products that support today's most demanding industrial, government and commercial applications. www.winsys.com.

contact us | site map | privacy
copyright ©2008 by Winchester Systems