News

Case study: BeTTY (Internal NSE tool)

September 01, 2010

BeTTY is an internal NSE tool that was born out of a requirement to streamline how our Virtual Machines on our server farms were managed. As our network expanded, to new datacenters in London, Manchester and New York it became necessary to be able to connect to each Virtual Machine regularly in order to make amendments to their configuration, or simply to reboot them.

BeTTY - a name which Chief Engineer Simon Talbot came up with, meaning 'Better Teletype' (TTY being a Unix expression) - allows our engineers to quickly get to any of the Virtual Machines.

So how does it work? First the engineer selects which cluster (collection of servers) the machine they wish to administer is in, in the relevant datacenter. The server list is then populated with the servers relevant to that cluster. 

Once they select the server, they then have the option to open a terminal window for configuration changes, or reboot the machine (soft or hard reset.) The software handles Windows and Linux servers seamlessly.

The screenshot below shows terminal windows for both Windows and Linux, and the application window (at the top.) That's Betty Ford's hair you can see poking out - she is the application logo!