Interoperability Testing Ensures Ecosystem Extensibility

Client Background

Our client is a storage management leader with development centers, labs and sales offices around the globe. The company’s Technical Operations team faced increasing demand to plan, execute, test and tune numerous configurations of hardware and software products along with their storage management offerings. This escalation was due in part to the new and expanding ecosystems being created by global digitalization. Thus, the client’s key objective was to rapidly and effectively certify its storage products for interoperability and compatibility with the known range of products and processes within these ecosystems.

Xoriant Solution | Key Contributions

Xoriant strategized and executed the testing, automation, and certification of storage arrays.

Conducted Interoperability Verification: Our experts tested all SAN and NAS Arrays for interoperability with the latest hardware and software configurations, including storage subsystems testing to determine the baseline for maximum throughput/IOPS.

Functional and system feature tests covered disaster recovery, data replication, compression, deduplication, load balancing, quota, ACL, ABE, join domain, and others. With our support, the storage arrays were certified to work flawlessly with the OSes, hypervisors, HBAs, FC switches, etc. in the product ecosystem.

Managed Performance Testing and Benchmarking: Our team performed a data-driven comparison test and RAID-level backend comparison tests, etc. to determine the versatility of any storage array with different types of disk drives. We employed static, as well as dynamic provisioning, and other virtualization techniques to ensure efficient, enterprise-class utilization of storage array capacity.

In addition, we performed scalability tests to verify the full capacity of any storage array. The team also obtained various performance measures by executing intensive tests on storage products by modifying configuration file of the testing tool to measure key performance metrics like IOPS (Input/ Output Operations per Second), CPU busy, read/write latency, response time, etc.

Performed Test Automation Activities: Our Automation Team developed test scripts to automate the manual process for Interoperability testing. For this case, the work was performed with Perl and Shell Scripts, using the storage domain concepts.

High Level Architecture

Key Benefits

• Increased customer base with product extensibility achieved by interoperability verifications and certifications.

• 25% faster time to market by automating the certification process for storage arrays across OS, hypervisors, HBAs and FC switches.

• 30% productivity boost using same team to certify additional storage arrays.

Technology Stack

VxVM | MPx10 | HDLM | Device Manager | Red Hat Linux | Windows OS | Oracle Enterprise Manager | HP-UX | VMware ESXi | Citrix XenServer | Microsoft Hyper-V | Emulex HBA | Brocade HBA | QLogic HBA | IBM HBA | HP HBA | Hitachi HBA | FC Switches (McData, Brocade, Cisco, QLogic)