THE LAB CHALLENGE

Today’s labs—whether in high-tech equipment manufacturing organisations or large carriers and service providers—face numerous challenges. They must ensure the quality of increasingly complex services and products, meet tight time-to-market deadlines, and support a globally distributed team with diverse skill sets. And they must do all this while minimising the ever-increasing costs associated with state of the art resources in a complex and expensive lab. Increasingly, lab efficiency affects the bottom line; and the test lab is caught in the middle, trying to find a way to do more in less time.

TODAY’S TOP 5 LAB CHALLENGES

1. Testbeds are monolithic and are not shared; teams compete for resources, leading to conflicts and delays.
2. Lab configuration is manual, time consuming and error-prone—leading to unacceptable downtime.
3. There are potentially infinite combinations of heterogeneous software and hardware products in the lab, requiring experts and specialists to correctly configure testbeds.
4. There is inadequate visibility into resource availability and utilisation due to lack of systemised and detailed reporting. An organisation’s thought leaders are thus unable to make informed decisions.
5. Inventory lists are manually maintained so are never accurate or up to date.

INTRODUCING ITEST LAB OPTIMISER

Spirent iTest Lab Optimiser is a powerful and intelligent lab management solution designed to help teams increase lab utilisation and performance by maximising efficient use of resources. Built for manual testers, automation specialists and managers alike—iTest Lab Optimiser improves the productivity of the entire test organisation by allowing you to:

• Lock, reserve and schedule resources, testbeds and topologies
• Activate logical topologies dynamically at runtime
• Create and manage topologies graphically
• Report on resource utilisation to improve lab efficiency
• Manage and maintain lab inventory

AVAILABLE AS AN APPLIANCE

iTest Lab Optimiser is also available as a hardware appliance, giving labs the opportunity to have a true turnkey solution. The appliance is available in the following configuration:

• CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-2600K Processor
• Memory: 16GB (2 x 8GB)
• Two hard drives: (1) 1TB HDD (2) 240GB SSD
• Dimensions: 2U (3.5”) height x 13” wide x 10” deep
• Power: 100-240V AC input, 300W max

Key Benefits

• Increase resource utilisation and lab performance by maximising efficient use of resources
• Dynamic and on-demand topology activation for remote and 24/7 testing
• Increase visibility into resource utilisation and scheduled executions
• Save time, money, and effort while enabling lights-out regression automation
• The entire team—managers, manual testers, and scripters—collaborate to improve productivity

SEAMLESS INTEGRATION WITH ITEST

iTest is integrated with iTest Lab Optimiser out of the box. With iTest users can:

• Create, edit and manage iLO topologies from iTest
• Reserve and activate iLO topologies from iTest

iTest will automatically activate a topology as part of reserving it for a scheduled execution. Additional integration between iTest and iTest Lab Optimiser comes in the form of iTest Lab Optimiser drivers, which are authored and executed as iTest QuickCalls. iTest users can thus quickly and easily create drivers to extend the iTest Lab Optimiser supported resources

INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

• iTest Lab Optimiser allows a lab manager to record physical inventory consisting of DUTs, servers, test equipment, Layer 1 and 2 switches, power control units, and network elements like hubs, switches and routers
• Use ports through VLANs setup through Layer 2 switches
• Port, Resource and User groups allow for easy assigning, tracking and limiting ownership of resources by teams
• Access equipment spread across multiple locations with multi-site support
• Auto-detect online/offline status for DUTs not directly connected to the Layer-1 switch
• Resource drivers built on iTest’s QuickCall technology allow for rapid extension of resources in the lab without having to learn proprietary APIs

SCHEDULING & RESERVATION

• iTest Lab Optimiser allows users to reserve and release resources at granularities ranging from whole topologies, to individual devices, down to individual ports
• This flexibility extends to resource sharing and making and canceling reservations with an intuitive time-based scheduling utility
• Ports will be automatically released and unmapped at the end of a reservation
• Users can schedule for immediate or on-demand execution
• Users can reserve/activate topologies right from within iTest

TOPOLOGY MANAGEMENT

• iTest Lab Optimiser allows users to activate and deactivate complex and large topologies. Physical topologies allow you to visually and accurately represent the entire lab, while logical topologies that represent a logical test set, test case, or test scenario enable the flexibility of swapping topologies on-demand.
• iTest Lab Optimiser intelligently activates logical topologies at runtime
• Create, edit and manage topologies using iTest, which allows testers to drag and drop resources to quickly and efficiently create complex yet visually clear topologies

REPORTING & UTILISATION

iTest Lab Optimiser provides instant and complete reporting on:

• User access (“who is using my lab and when?”)
• Inventory (“what is in my lab?”)
• Topologies (“how are the resources in my lab connected?”)
• Schedules and reservations (“what executions are happening/going to happen in my lab?”)
• Resource utilisation reports help to pinpoint opportunities for improvement

USER ACCESS CONTROL

• iTest Lab Optimiser supports the entire testing organisation—including manual testers, scripters, automation systems, lab managers and other thought leaders
• Access control leverages the organisation’s existing LDAP authentication
• The capability model of multi-level authorisation enables managers to assign administrator, super-user access, or standard user access
• Assign, track and limit ownership of resources by user groups or teams
• A GUI-based administration tool allows system administrators to manage users as well as assign roles

Find out more information about the iTest Lab Optimiser from Spirent here
iTest Lab Optimiser Brochure