Advanced Solutions Lab

The Advanced Solutions Lab (ASL) established by VSTI’s Technology Consulting Group (TCG) is a state of the art computing center. The ASL is designed to support a wide variety of prototypes, proof of concepts, benchmarks, and demonstrations using both commercial software products and VSTI developed code. Working with VSTI, the ASL offers customers the opportunity to develop, test, and evaluate solutions to their difficult data management and processing problems in an environment that will not impact ongoing development efforts or production systems. VSTI’s modular approach to systems engineering has been used to design modular hardware and software components that can be reused in the ASL as a framework and infrastructure to provide all peripheral functionality and drivers needed for rapid development and testing.

For example, if a customer would like to evaluate the entity extraction capabilities of several different commercial products, VSTI’s modular architecture provides the data sources, data parsers, data feed drivers, and metrics collection services. This tested and proven infrastructure allows engineers to quickly focus in on the problem, i.e., evaluate the commercial software, instead of having to spend valuable time designing and building the peripheral services needed to support the evaluation. The end result is a rapid yet comprehensive and thorough evaluation of the products.

VSTI’s ASL offers the following features:

• Self contained network that allows network bandwidth utilization to be isolated and analyzed
• A high-speed connection to the internet so demonstrations can be shown in any facility that has internet connectivity
• A mix of Sun SunFire v490, 4200, and T2000 servers along with servers running Linux and Windows
• Over 2 terabytes of storage
• A robust configuration management control system that supports rapid reconfiguration of the hardware and software
• VSTI’s vendor partnerships allow us to leverage additional hardware as needed and obtain numerous software products for evaluation.

If you have a tough problem, for which you would like to investigate and evaluate solutions, please contact VSTI’s TCG.