De Novo R&D Lab

General information

What is De Novo Laboratory? There are several ways to answer this question.

Professional design tool:
- verification of the solution concept and the choice of basic technologies and architectures;
- modeling and prototyping of technical solutions.
A means for replicating and developing the competencies of system architects and experts in the following areas:
- practical introduction to new vendor technologies;
- developing practical skills of operating hardware and software;
- modeling of emergencies and recovery operations.
R&D base of De Novo projects:
- trial, evaluation and selection of basic technologies to be used as components of solutions;
- expansion of the De Novo product portfolio in line with the strategic roadmap.
Base of custom R&D projects:
- finding solutions to specific challenges of the customer;
- developing custom technical solutions (maximally adapted and optimized), developing methods and tools for their replication on the customer’s premises.
Resource center for partners and customers:
- possibility to rent both raw resources and ready-made software landscapes for purposes of functional and/or nonfunctional testing of business applications;
- software and hardware base for internal R&D projects of partners and customers.

The Laboratory has been created using the latest conceptual approaches to building an IT infrastructure (specifically the concept of a service-oriented infrastructure, SOI) along with latest generation hardware and software.

The Laboratory currently has the following resources at its disposal:

A key feature of the De Novo Laboratory is the availability of a laboratory landscape management system that:

makes it possible to quickly create, activate, and disassemble sophisticated multiple-machine logical architectures without going into the details of the virtualizing layer configuration;
allows creating and using libraries of applications, operating environments, and logical architectures;
allows creating clones of logical architectures simultaneously functioning in an isolated environment (example: development environment + test environment);
allows rationing out resources and allocating resource usage times.

Especially noteworthy is the fundamental difference between the Laboratory’s resources and demo hardware provided by vendors and distributors. As a rule, it is impossible to use demo hardware autonomously. For a start, it has to be surrounded with the required infrastructure – power supply and cooling, connection to LAN, SAN and control console – and requires interaction with other elements of the test environment. Only after this has been accomplished, can demo hardware be considered a resource.

Laboratory resources for lease

The majority of IT projects require dedicated IT infrastructures at development and deployment stages. Most often there is a need to create a development and test environment, occasionally – to perform resource sizing, load testing, or nonfunctional testing (testing of resources for failure-proof and/or disaster-proof operation).

A traditional approach to addressing this task would be to create a temporary IT infrastructure dedicated to a specific project. Yet this approach has a number of major shortcomings. Specifically:

Creating a project-specific IT infrastructure normally takes from several weeks to several months – selection, procurement, installation, and configuration of hardware and systemic software. Quite often the main IT project cannot be launched before the temporary IT infrastructure is fully in place – a delay that may be incompatible with business success.
The need for a project-specific dedicated IT infrastructure increases project costs, which may adversely affect the investor appeal of the project. In some cases, such as when load testing is required, the costs may prove unaffordable.
Once the project is completed and the deployed application is transferred to the production platform, the temporary IT infrastructure is no longer needed. Yet it is far from always possible to put the redundant hardware to effective use.
Even partial integration of the temporary project-specific IT infrastructure with the primary infrastructure of the company may destabilize its operation and threaten the company’s data security.

De Novo has come forward with an alternative approach, offering the De Novo Laboratory as a resource center for its customers. Leasing Laboratory resources to create a temporary infrastructure for IT projects is free from the shortcomings listed above.

In-house specialists of partners and customers can access the Laboratory as a resource center in the following ways:

remote access via a secure channel;
local access from host workstations equipped with terminals on De Novo premises.

Customers can lease both physical elements of the computing infrastructure (servers, data storage systems) and logical resources (operating environments) controlled by virtualization environments.

Physical resources

Leasing of physical resources (servers, data storage systems) is recommended for the following tasks:

resource sizing or load testing;

testing resources used for virtualization and control of virtual infrastructures;
testing resources for failure-proof and/or disaster-proof operation, including those built into virtualization resources;
testing applied software in various environments and on various platforms;
testing operating systems for compatibility with individual hardware types.

Logical resources

A logical resource is a combination of computing power, logical disk space, and networking resources. A logical resource is an operating environment suitable for the functioning of the operating system, systemic and applied software.

A combination of interacting operating environments can be united into a logical architecture intended for deploying sophisticated software complexes. Once development and testing have been completed, the logical architecture can be exported from the laboratory landscape and deployed on the customer’s resources.

Leasing of logical resources is recommended for the following tasks:

functional testing of software complexes;
creating an infrastructure for systemic and business application deployment projects;
training specialists of the maintenance service.

For more information, please e-mail at forinfo@de-novo.biz, or call +38 044 200-9339