IT Infrastructure Digital Twin for On-Demand Cloud Replication
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Solution Overview
Problem
Maintaining pre-production testing environments for software changes in corporate IT infrastructures is expensive and laborious, often requiring duplicate hardware and software licenses, and companies lack efficient tools to quickly replicate and test software changes without disrupting production.
Innovation Solution
A digital twin is created by crawling the IT infrastructure to identify and classify servers, generating a server graph, and creating executable scripts to replicate the IT infrastructure in the cloud, allowing on-demand testing and validation of software changes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a pre-production testing environment is maintained to test software changes, then software changes can be tested before deployment, but the cost of maintaining duplicate hardware and software licenses increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates virtual copies (virtual machines) of the production IT infrastructure environment. Instead of maintaining duplicate physical hardware and licensing, virtualization technology allows multiple virtual instances to share underlying physical resources while providing isolated testing environments. This reduces hardware requirements and software license costs while enabling comprehensive software change testing.
Solution Approach 2:
The virtualized testing environment can serve multiple purposes: testing software changes, validating configurations, performing disaster recovery drills, and training. A single virtualized infrastructure platform provides universal functionality across different testing and validation scenarios, eliminating the need for separate dedicated environments for each purpose.
2Reliability
If in-house IT technicians manually track and replicate servers in the pre-production environment, then the testing environment can be maintained, but the labor time and complexity increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The system enables automated self-service provisioning of virtual testing environments. IT technicians can automatically provision, configure, and tear down virtual machine instances on-demand through automated orchestration. The system automatically replicates production environment configurations and maintains synchronization, eliminating manual tracking and replication efforts while ensuring testing environment accuracy.
Solution Approach 2:
The system pre-configures virtual machine templates with standard software stacks and configurations before they are needed for testing. When a testing scenario is initiated, pre-configured templates can be rapidly instantiated and customized, significantly reducing the time required to set up testing environments compared to building from scratch each time.
3Reliability
If comprehensive pre-production environment is built to test all software changes, then system shutdowns and unintended consequences are prevented, but the infrastructure cost and maintenance burden double
Solution Approach 1:
Virtual machine technology creates lightweight virtual copies of production servers that can be deployed rapidly. These virtual instances provide comprehensive testing capability without requiring duplicate physical hardware for every server. The virtualized environment faithfully replicates production behavior while consuming fraction of the physical resources, enabling thorough software change validation without doubling infrastructure costs.
4Quantity of substance
If traditional cloud infrastructure deployment methods are used, then cloud environments can be created, but the deployment time takes weeks or months for large data centers
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-configures virtual machine templates with complete software stacks, configurations, and dependencies before deployment is needed. When cloud infrastructure is required, these pre-built templates can be rapidly instantiated and deployed in minutes or hours rather than weeks or months. The preliminary preparation of standardized templates enables fast provisioning while maintaining comprehensive infrastructure capability.
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses parameterized templates that can be quickly configured with different specifications (compute resources, storage capacity, network settings) to match various cloud infrastructure requirements. By changing template parameters rather than building infrastructure from scratch, the system adapts to different deployment scenarios rapidly while reusing the same underlying template framework.
Data Source
Figure 1A
Figure 1B
Figure 2A
AI summary
A digital twin of an IT infrastructure is created to identify a group of critical servers (called "base servers") needed to replicate the IT infrastructure in a cloud-computing environment. To identify the correct base servers and their actual server configurations, the IT infrastructure is crawled and various telemetry, connection, and network data is analyzed against data sets of other known servers. The digital twin is created to include these base servers and their particular configurations. Then, the digital twin may be deployed on demand in the cloud-computing environment using executable scripts that mimic the base servers and their particular configurations, creating a replication of the IT infrastructure for various purposes (e.g., redundancy, testing, etc.).