Tour the Avaya Solutions and Energy Lab

By Wilson Korol | 29 Oct 2010

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of an extensive tour of the Avaya Solutions and Energy Lab at our site in Billerica, Massachusetts. This lab came into Avaya via the Nortel acquisition and has been doing pretty incredible, impressive and innovative work for 2+ years.

My guide for the tour was the leader of the lab, John Bongiorno. John and his team of Solution Architects built out the lab with a really practical goal, to diligently replicate actual deployments that were going into customers' locations and businesses. As he puts it, "the best way to test is to build out completely." Sounds simple, right?

But think about the number of variables and the uniqueness in each business' operations. So, they took several existing and challenging deployments and modeled what gear went into to service actual customer needs and built from there in the lab environment. Then, because the deployments are in the lab setting, the highly capable team John leads is able to stress test the solution. As a result, they are able to project where issue might arise and proactively adapt to mitigate the issues and take steps to prevent whatever issue might happen in our customer's live, vital and essential communication networks.

The gear that in the lab included hundreds of phones, workstations loaded with typical business software, the data core and the phone core. All are built to spec and upgraded only as recommended by Avaya and the other software/hardware vendors, such as Microsoft. In the past, when there a issue came up the team submitted it via the normal customer support/services process, so that it was classified as any other customer request, all to ensure accuracy with the lab mantra of modeling actual customer deployments.

Through some pretty sophisticated and heavy duty hardware, the team is then able to mirror out the load from the physical hardware in-house to mimic much larger solutions, in effect virtualization in reverse. With this mirroring, all of the typical locations for a customer can be incorporated into the build, from the central office/campus all the way to a small branch location. As a result, they have over 50 scenarios in play up in Billerica.

One last super cool feature of the lab is its ability to be managed entirely via remote service delivery. In fact, John lives about 3 hours away in Connecticut (which made me even more appreciative of his drive into the lab for the tour). His team has been spread all over the country, and they are able to get into the testing scenarios and manipulate all of the variables to test the myriad of combinations outlines above. Pretty cool, and the ability to do that remotely is also a green benefit in my book, abating travel and commuting.

The Energy Lab
The last really cool thing that John showed me was the Avaya Energy Lab, which is part of the larger solutions lab. This lab was the location where the testing was conducted for the recently announced Tolly Test Report, Avaya 9600 Series Voice over IP Phones: Energy Consumption Evaluation versus Cisco Unified IP Phone 7900 Series.

The testing was actually the impetus for my visit to the lab and it was very cool to see how the team had set up the lab environment. Basically each of the IP phones was staged in an area of the lab where they were isolated, monitored and measured. The testing included the backend of the solution as well, which are also measured and monitored. For the testing, the Avaya team wrote protocols that ensured stable environments and impartiality throughout, which were then reviewed by Tolly.

All in all, I was so impressed with this facility and hope that my post here has given you a little flavor of that experience. A big thanks to Bongi.

Posted 29 Oct 2010 at 01:12 PM