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Picture this: you oversee a technical assistance center (TAC) for a major network equipment manufacturer, handling support tickets for enterprise customers worldwide. One of your top TAC engineers, Jane, has been working with a customer trying to recreate a bug—one that may well need to be escalated to Product Engineering. Jane is incredibly meticulous, and she’s spent hours building out an environment that precisely mirrors the customer’s and then running a huge number of tests. The problem: she’s not yet finished, but her shift is ending and she needs to put a halt to the testing.
You recently consolidated your lab footprint, and TAC engineers in different regions now access virtualized resources from a shared pool. This means Jane will have to release her lab resources to make them available to other engineers helping customers in other time zones. And when she returns, she’ll need to rebuild the whole test environment from scratch—wasting hours recreating her work and further delaying resolution of the issue.
As more organizations pursue lab transformation and consolidation, this problem is becoming more common. But what if TAC engineers could just click “save” to record a test environment in exact detail, and then automatically reproduce it in the future, in minutes? For organizations using Spirent Velocity Core, this is no longer hypothetical. With the new Reservation Snap-N-Restore feature, quickly recreating a test environment with the shared lab resources just got possible.
Overcoming Consolidation Challenges
Lab transformation has become a key priority for many businesses—network equipment vendors, of course, but also technology service providers, financial institutions, and other enterprises. Indeed, any organization that provides technical support services, or just conducts regular network testing and validation, can benefit from lab automation and consolidation. Using platforms like Spirent Velocity, organizations can deliver virtualized lab resources wherever they’re needed, on demand. They can reduce capital expenditures (Capex) for testing equipment, accelerate time to resolution, maximize utilization of lab resources, and more.
As more businesses tap into these benefits, however, they’re bumping up against the same challenge: balancing the desire to consolidate with the need to ensure that everyone can access the lab resources they need, when they need them. Virtualization makes it easier to share infrastructure, but organizations still purchase a finite number of licenses. When lab resources are being used by one engineer, they’re not available for another.
Compounding this challenge, it can take hours to set up a lab topology in the correct state—identifying the right hardware, provisioning firmware and software versions, recreating the customers’ interfaces, ports, and other resources—before testing can even begin. Once a TAC engineer replicates an issue, it can then be handed off to Product Validation, then Engineering, and potentially others before finally returning a resolution to the TAC engineer and customer. At each handoff, everyone involved must be able to access the same test environment, configured exactly the same way. And that’s just for one incident; TAC might work with a customer repeatedly for months, recreating their topology from scratch every time.
With the latest release of Velocity, Spirent becomes the industry’s first lab transformation partner to solve the challenge of recreating a specific test environment. Developed in cooperation with Velocity customers, Snap-N-Restore may not eliminate the problem of sharing limited resources, but it makes it far less burdensome. Now, TAC engineers can save a detailed snapshot of their lab environment (the “active reservation”) whenever they need to pause their work. When they’re ready to resume, at any time in the future, they can recreate that setup in minutes. Velocity identifies the same hardware (or alternate hardware with matching characteristics) and automatically re-provisions the test environment with the precise saved topology and state.
Now, engineers don’t have to worry about losing data or progress, or having to redo their work each time they tear down a test environment and release the resources to their colleagues. The same resources can be used in multiple ways, by multiple teams, with each engineer picking up where they left off even weeks or months later.
The Velocity Advantage
Spirent Velocity is already helping leading TAC organizations and enterprises reimagine how they provision and manage labs. With the ability to save and restore test environments with a few clicks, lab consolidation becomes more accessible, easier to implement, and even more powerful. Snap-N-Restore helps organizations:
Reduce CapEx and optimize capital efficiency: TAC organizations and enterprises can take lab transformation initiatives to the next level,consolidating resources even further while continuing to provide the same or better service-level agreements (SLAs) to customers.
Improve operational efficiency and productivity: Test engineers no longer need to waste hours redoing their work; they can instantly recreate a copy of it. So can anyone else who needs to work with a previously saved test environment. Meanwhile, TAC engineers can shift from one case to another with ease and manage more open cases at once.
Accelerate time-to-resolution/time-to-market: The ability to restore saved lab environments with a few clicks also enables different teams to collaborate on issues in parallel, each using the identical saved topology. Handoffs between engineers and teams become faster and smoother, enabling everyone to deliver outcomes quicker.
Improve customer experiences: Customers who need technical support don’t just get faster resolution. Now, any time they need assistance, any TAC engineer in the organization can instantly recreate their environment, even months after an initial incident was reported.
Optimize testing and quality: The ability to save detailed snapshots of testbed configurations also benefits testing and development processes. Engineers can now create reference topologies with the configurations that customers find most valuable. And they can run more variations of the same testbed, more quickly and easily, to apply even broader testing.
These Snap-N-Restore capabilities represent a major advance in the evolution of lab transformation and automation. Yes, they make life easier for TAC engineers, customers, and anyone conducting advanced network testing. But more importantly, they enable businesses to make optimal use of their capital investments, without having to sacrifice quality or speed. Suddenly, lab consolidation itself—and the huge benefits that come with it—becomes a more viable option for many more businesses.
To learn more about Spirent Velocity, visit the Velocity Core webpage.
