Environments

The IBM Sterling® Order Management System product consists of multiple environments that are provisioned to you by IBM®.

IBM installs, maintains, and routinely applies maintenance fixes and upgrades to the following environments:
  • Development
  • Quality Assurance
  • Pre-Production
  • Production
  • Master Configuration

The architecture of each environment is designed and managed by IBM. If you need additional environments, contact your Client Success Manager (CSM) or an IBM sales representative.

Sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (SPII) and Payment Card Industry (PCI) data cannot be stored within these environments. You are responsible for ensuring that the data being used is not sensitive.

Severity 1 case support is only available for the Production environment after it is live. You can learn more about Severity 2 and 3 cases within the IBM Support Guide.

You have full administrative control of all your Sterling™ Order Management System environments through Self Service during the initial onboarding phase and after going live.

These environments are not exposed to the public. You, your business users, implementation team, and business partners must first request access and register with IBM. You can then access the environments by enabling public external facing IP addresses/IP ranges or through the jump host in remote circumstances.
Note: Individual home IP addresses are not enabled, as they can often change.

Development environment

You can use the Development environment to perform the following actions:
  • Deploy new code releases
  • Test fixes before releasing to Quality Assurance
  • Complete module testing
  • Install deployable artifacts
  • Verify SaaS extensions
  • Complete runtime integration of development changes and integrations

Development is a programming environment that you can use to create custom code and extensions for your service. You or your systems integrator are responsible for providing a separate environment for your developers to use to customize your service.

Development is a non-high availability environment with a limited disk space of approximately 100GB. The following diagram shows the components of the environment and the tools you can use to interact with it.
Sterling Order Management System development environment.

Quality Assurance environment

You can use the Quality Assurance environment to test the following:
  • Integrations
  • Service
  • Applications
  • Extensions
Quality Assurance is a non-high availability environment with a limited disk space of approximately 100GB. The following diagram shows the components of the environment and the tools you can use to interact with it.
Sterling Order Management Systemquality assurance environment.

Pre-Production environment

The Pre-Production environment is an exact replica of your Production environment. You can use this environment to complete the following:
  • User acceptance testing
  • Integration testing
  • Performance evaluation or testing

Pre-Production also acts as the Disaster Recovery environment. It can handle the same load as the Production environment on the application and database server tiers. Data is the only difference between the two environments, as Pre-Production resides within a different data center than your Production environment.

Only the Pre-Production environment should be used for performance testing.

The following diagram shows the components of the Pre-Production and environment and the tools you can use to interact with it.
Sterling Order Management System preproduction environment.

Master Configuration environment

The Master Configuration environment acts as the configuration source of truth for all other environments. Configuration is authored in this environment and pushed to other environments using the Configuration Deployment Tool (CDT). As a best practice, you should not use any other environment to create or manage your configuration data.

For more information, see Guidelines on Configuration Data Movement.

Master Configuration is a high-availability environment with a limited disk space of approximately 100GB. The following diagram shows the components of the Master Configuration environment and the tools you can use to interact with it.
Sterling Order Management System master configuration environment.

Production environment

The Production environment is where your services and store are made available to your customers. You can use this environment to manage customer-facing operations, as it includes all of your application, systems, and supporting systems infrastructure that your end users access on an operational basis to complete business processes and transactions. Access to this environment is restricted to authorized users only.

Each IBM Sterling Order Management System service runs within the IBM SoftLayer infrastructure. The topology for every service is standard and immutable.

This environment is designed to handle your peak operation load and have high availability for the environment components. Production is the only environment that your Service Level Objective (SLO) applies to within your contract. This environment includes 24x7 support for severity 1 cases. Severity 2 and 3 cases are also supported as described in the IBM Support Guide.

The following options are available in the Production environment when you enter a case with Support:
  • Put message, browse message, and find oldest message
  • Restart the application server
  • Reset the transaction database
You and your implementation team have the following access:
  • Read-only access to logs, files, and the IBM Sterling Order Management System installation directory to view logs and diagnose issues.
  • Read-only access to logs and files to diagnose issues.
  • Full access to all business user and administrator web-based tools for IBM Sterling Order Management System.
The following diagram shows the components of the Production environment and the tools you can use to interact with it.
Sterling Order Management System production environment.

Additional environments

IBM Sterling Order Management System depends on, but does not provide, four types of environments. You or your implementation team are responsible for providing the following environments:
  • Programming environments (local machines used by developers)
  • Build server
  • Source code repository (such as SVN or Github)
    Note: Contact IBM Sales if you need help obtaining a repository tool.
  • Email server

Programming environments are the configuration of developer toolkits that each of your development team members must set up and use to develop code to customize your IBM Sterling Order Management System service. You, your development team, and your business partners are responsible for planning, creating, and owning these environments. IBM has no ownership or access to your programming environments. See the Coordinating programming responsibilities topic for more information.

The build server and source code environment is the configuration of servers, machines, and source code repositories that your developers and systems integrator must use to build your IBM Sterling Order Management System-related source code into deployable artifacts. These deployable artifacts can then be uploaded to your IBM Sterling Order Management System environments. You or your business partner are responsible for planning, creating, and owning this environment. IBM has no ownership or access to your build server and source code environment.

You can contact IBM to use a Git repository that is hosted by IBM Bluemix DevOps Services or an IBM Jazz® source control management (SCM) system as your source code repository at an additional cost.

IBM recommends the IBM Bluemix DevOps Services Delivery Pipeline. For more information, visit the IBM Bluemix® catalog and select the following options:
  1. Under the Services category, click DevOps.
  2. Select Delivery Pipeline.
  3. Click Track and Plan for project tracking.