Abstract: A technique for verifying the safety of tenant data in a data center includes creating a topological map of storage constructs used for storing the tenant data within the data center. The topological map includes a logical storage device, a physical storage device, and a set of hardware structures disposed between the logical and physical storage devices. The constructs of the topological map are evaluated to generate an individual assessment of fault tolerance of each construct, and a set of rules are applied to generate an overall assessment of the safety of the tenant data. In an example, an administrator may operate this technique on a tenant application and generate a report for the tenant summarizing the results.

Abstract: Designing a test bed for testing a computer product includes (1) obtaining customer configuration data describing different system configurations in which the computer product is used, (2) preprocessing the customer configuration data to generate structured customer configuration, (3) applying a classification to the structured customer configuration data to separate the distinct system configurations into groupings according to similarity in one or more of the system attributes among members of each group, and (4) for each grouping, identifying a representative system configuration to be used for testing and generating a corresponding set of test bed definition data describing the representative system configuration to enable implementation. The classification may employ clustering analysis, and supplementary and/or backup techniques may be included.