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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

Friday, April 14, 2023

Self-Service for Complex IT Infrastructure

Wing Ho, Techinical Account Manager, QualiSystems

Dave Chandler, Enterprise Networking Solutions Practice Lead, WWT

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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

Global Software Company

Established 2004, privately held

North America HQ: Santa Clara, CA

R&D Center: Tel Aviv, Israel

Market-leading supplier of automation solutions for:• IT infrastructure self-service for DevOPS agility and cloud evolution• Test lab management, test automation, continuous development/integration

Mature, proven technology:• Hundreds of customer deployments

Cisco DevNet partner

Who is Quali?

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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

Challenges:• Infrastructure is complex, not just VMs• Automation is often silo’d and can be

quite code-centric• Relatively few programmers in the team

So you need to get more “agile”?

Mandate: Self-service IT, support DevOps, continuous everything

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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

Self-Service with a Side of IT Governance

• Accountability and control

• Reservation-based

• Both auto-provisioning and auto-reclamation

• Resource usage can be “all you can eat” model today

• Resource hoarding, waste

• “VM sprawl”, poor utilization

• Lost productivity, agility

• Higher CAPEX and OPEX

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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

WWT Case Study

WWT Advanced Technology Center

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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

Customer Demonstrations

Training environments for sales and professional services engineers

Sandbox environments

Customer proof of concepts

Beta and EFT environments

Advanced Technology Center

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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

WWT ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY CENTER

ATC

EBC

ATC – Advanced Technology Center

EBC – Executive Briefing Center

26,000 sq. ft. building

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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

Challenges

High Utilization• A victim of our own success!

Difficult to schedule appropriate topology• Lab Manager often has to consult pod owners to determine what is needed

No granular device scheduling • All or nothing – entire sandbox is reserved

Re-cabling required • Different cabling than “default” is requested

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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

Previous Scheduling Mechanism

Ticket is opened in Ticketing System

Lab Manager picks up request• Emails/phones “pod owner” to discuss request and

topology needs

If request is granted:• Pod owner/lab staff cables topology• Clears existing configurations and install correct OS• Installs baseline configuration and management

interfaces – Multiple Devices• Confirms topology

Lab Starts – Topology locked out for “x” days

Rinse and repeat

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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

Qualisystems

What we are hoping for • Increase granularity of scheduling•Decrease complexity of scheduling•Automate scheduling and lab launch

• Automate cable changes• Increase multi-tenant capabilities

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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

Qualisystems

Cabling •Onpath Matrix Switch (Layer 1 Switch)

•Openflow switches

Automation and Scripting framework•Qualisystems

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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

• Increase granularity of scheduling• Decrease complexity of scheduling• Automate scheduling and lab launch• Automate cable changes• Increase multi-tenant capabilities• Replication of entire topologies to service catalogs• Increase quality of documentation• Include automation and configuration of Storage, VMs• Reduce power consumption• Accurate inventory of equipment• Interleave labs• Cost Avoidance• SDN use case

Much more than we expected!

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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

Inventory objects:• Actual inventory including physical, virtual, cloud,

apps, tools, subnets, etc.• Hierarchical structure for granular multi-tenancy

o EG: Chassis—blade—port for bare metal switcheso Attributes: abstraction+ provisioning object

parameters

• Enables reservation/multi-tenancy

Provisioning objects• Resource level interfaces

Process task objects• Test automation (functional, sanity, regression)• Continuous Integration

Build and Maintain an Object LayerBest Practice

# 1

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Pre-packaged libraries (of course)Independent interface creation:• Integrate and “objectize” API’s

• Utilize existing scripts (TCL, python, etc.)— no “starting from zero”

• Capture and objectize CLI, SNMP, terminal interactions

Make them small and maintainable

Overcomes interfacing obstacles

Removes roadmap dependencies

Helps integrate legacy/special infrastructure

OOTB & DIY Integration ToolsBest Practice

# 2

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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

• Visual environment/topology creationo Inventory-based modelingo Enables reservation of entire environmentso Simple to any arbitrary network

topologyo Abstract design to maximize utilizationo Packaged with provisioning &

reclamation flows

• Visual workflow authoringo Hide syntax from userso Dramatically scale “service creation”o Continuous integration, test automation

Visual Topology & Workflow CreationBest Practice

# 3

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QualiSystems Proprietary & Confidential

IT Infrastructure Self-Service to People & Processes

TO

RESULT