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networkZONE Products for the week of June 26, 2006
EdenTree Technologies Says…
Lab Manager 5.0 Network Lab Automation Software Features
Queuing and Test Automation Flexibility
Modular Lab Manager 5.0 provides software-controlled lab environment
that reduces network equipment and network service testing time
EdenTree Technologies, innovator of lab management and test automation solutions for network equipment manufacturers, service providers, and enterprises, announced Lab Manager 5.0, a totally re-architected version of its award-winning network lab automation software. The solution is significantly enhanced to be more open, scalable, and modular, and includes new features such as event-based scheduling, a Web interface, and integrated power control.
Lab Manager is an open "lab operating system" that works with any kind of network equipment, managing physical layer infrastructure to which test equipment and devices under test (DUT) are connected. The result is a software-controlled lab environment with a simple, drag-and-drop user interface that allows engineers to easily and remotely design and implement topologies. The software includes a robust scheduler that allows topologies, configurations, and test scripts to be scheduled, a search function to find available devices, and a reporting system that tracks device utilization. Because it is integrated with a wide range of switches, Lab Manager works in any lab with any devices and any interface types, including POTS/analog, T1/E1, DS3/E3, any rate Ethernet, Optical, Fibre Channel, and RF/Coax interfaces.
A number of EdenTree's key customers have influenced the design of Lab Manager 5.0 and worked with the company to provide input into the product's features, including Hitachi Data Systems, Cisco Systems, and Verizon.
"Our customers are under increasing market pressure to ship high-quality systems on time, and it makes a huge impact on their bottom line when they can use Lab Manager to cut their test times from months to weeks or even days," said Jay Oyakawa, EdenTree president and CEO. "We have worked very closely with some of our major customers in the storage area networking and triple play industries on the development of Lab Manager 5.0. This release promises to increase the value proposition through new flexibility and more sophisticated user controls and functionality that result in greater test throughput and higher equipment utilization."
Easier Equipment Sharing
A key reason labs use Lab Manager is the ability to share expensive test
equipment among multiple users and multiple test beds. Lab Manager 5.0's
queue-based scheduler enhances this capability by allowing a test to be
queued to run at the earliest available time based on equipment availability.
Administrators can adjust the priorities or insert a higher-priority project
into the queue.
Also new to Lab Manager 5.0 is integration with power controllers allowing
test engineers to control power cycling and system rebooting directly from
Lab Manager, integrate with the GUI or script control of test topologies.
The software supports power controllers from leading vendors, including
APC, Cyberswitching Inc., MRV Communications, Server Technology and WTI.
analogZONE Says . . .
While this is a bit different than the chips and application software I normally review, I thought it was worth bringing to your attention. If you are developing networking equipment, I probably don't have to tell you how painful and time-consuming the extensive interoperability and compliance testing required to bring a product to market can be. While EdenTree Lab Manager software cannot reduce the number of iterations or actual test time these tests require, it does dramatically reduce the set-up time and human labor required to manage them.
In short, Lab Manager is a lab operating system for network labs automating them with an automatic patch panel that replaces manually-configured equipment. It can be used to configure several popular, moderately-priced 3rd-party commodity optical and electronic switches to create whatever connection topology is required for your particular set of tests. The company says that it can test everything from layer-2 functionality to higher-layer SoftSwitches,as well as VoIP and multimedia applications. Design engineers should find this useful for automating most of the tasks involved with functional, performance, and interoperability testing as well as standards compliance certification.
Besides the obvious benefits, the web-based interface makes it easy for engineers to configure and run most of the testing from desk or home, or around the world. It also enables multiple workgroups to time-share the same test bed with nearly no delays between reconfigurations. The software's integrated scheduling system reduces the chaos further and can initiate testing as soon as equipment becomes available. I'd suspect that, in some circumstances, this feature alone may pay for the cost of the software in simply on the basis of reduced capital equipment costs.
The new version of Lab Manager has been updated based on inputs from customers to improve capacity and add functionality. Its SQL database makes configuration easy, as well as generation of custom features and reports. It also includes cute little touches like a notification service which can reach you on your computer, PDA or cell phone to inform you of scheduled, or unexpected events.
Thanks to updated user and group level access permissions, customers and partners can participate in the test process, while allowing the lab to keep control over test beds. The controlled access features are great for making sure key projects have access to critical resources. This ability to segregate test groups could also be very valuable in situations like interoperability tests where several competing companies must share the same lab, to cloak customer equipment under test, and its test results, from prying eyes of competitors.
Lab Manager 5.0 will be available on an appliance, or as an application for multiple platforms. Pricing is based on a per-port basis with a list price of $72/port.
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