Staging Environment

In the current there are so many e-Commerce sites, many online stores which are operate 24*7, So in this situation it difficult to perform maintenance or test changes to the system. The Web Sphere Commerce staging server allows the Site Administrator to update the data on the staging server and test the changes, and then propagate the change to the production server. This is useful for testing updates to the product catalog, but it is also important for testing new shopping process commands. The staging server is useful for both technical and business users. The staging environment lets you move Web site assets within and across different environments

For example: Suppose in an online store there is a small changed, any product has been update or any discount updated. So verifying these changes in a test environment ensures that the changes do not cause incorrect or unexpected situations in the production environment. Once tested successfully, the changes can be moved to the production server. In an enterprise deployment, you can define staging projects to move content from the development environment to the integration/test environment, from there to the staging environment, and from there to the production environment.

The staging environment consists of two components:

• The staging database server.
• The staging server.

Staging Database Server

The staging database server contains the business data, such as marketing campaigns and product catalogs, and database resources that you want to stage to the database servers in the production environment. Business users can update business data in the staging environment so that you can test and approve the changes before you incorporate the changes into the run-time environment. The staging environment prevents disruption of the run-time site and services by isolating the test and production systems.

Staging Server

The staging server is a mirror of the production business management server. You create staging projects and routes on the staging server to deploy site updates from the test environment to the production environment. You can also use the staging server to deploy updates to geographically distributed environments across a wide area network (WAN).

Comparison in Staging environment and Production Environment

Setup	Staging server	Production server
Hardware	same	same
Software version	same	same
Operating system version	same	same
Configuration	same	same
WebSphere Application Server	same	same
WebSphere Commerce Server	same	same
Database server	same	same
Database	same	same

These similarities allow a user to test changes on the staging server as if it were the production server. These tests reassure users that changes that run correctly on the staging server will run correctly on the production server. This is the basic philosophy of the staging serve. Once the testing completes, a user may want a function to automatically propagate the changes to the production server.

Reference: http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter, http://msdn.microsoft.com