IBM Japan and Nissay Information Technology have said that they will jointly develop a cloud-based development and test environment to create mission critical web systems for Nippon Life Insurance. The test and development environment is expected to launch in September 2010.

According to IBM, the new development and test environment will maximize the benefits of Nissay’s existing resources, while allowing better allocation of IT resources depending on development workload.

The new cloud environment is expected to allow Nissay developers to procure new test and development environments in hours. Nissay will maintain a test environment that allocates resources in a fixed format to prevent impact on ongoing development projects and maintain test quality.

The new development and test environment uses IBM’s UNIX server IBM Power Systems and operational management software Tivoli Service Automation Manager.

IBM Power Systems can quickly scale to virtualize 1,000 logical partitions, so that cloud computing environment and test environment can co-exist. IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager delivers standard application and design templates, allowing users to obtain necessary IT resources easily and flexibly.