Innovation Lab at ITRIS

Almost every day, new disruptive technologies and approaches come onto the market. To keep pace with this development and to keep our portfolio up to date with the latest possibilities, we operate an Innovation Lab. In this lab, we test new technologies and approaches and compare them with existing, established technologies.

Why an Innovation Lab?

IT partners with a current, leading solutions portfolio are rare, as they often align themselves with just a few vendors instead of with technologies and solution approaches. Our customers expect independent advice from us, without influence from any vendor. Most vendors have a few outstanding solutions, which are then supplemented in the portfolio with “me-too” products. Filtering out the “me-too” products and focusing on leading products is, in our view, a core task of a “value-added” partner/reseller of IT solutions.

Evaluation

New technologies and approaches are reviewed several times a year in a comprehensive POC. The following areas are considered:

1. Technology
   How is the solution or product defined from a technological perspective? What functions are offered, and how does it differ from other solutions, products, or approaches? How easy is implementation and operation?
2. Partnership
   What sales model does the vendor pursue? Do they have a presence in the countries and provide good support? Is it easy to work with the provider? Do they treat every customer as an equal?
3. Perception
   How are the vendor/provider and its solutions/products perceived in the market and by customers?

Completed POCs

Over the past 18 months, we have completed the following POCs in our Innovation Lab:

• Four renowned HCI solutions
• Three infrastructure monitoring solutions
• Three midrange and enterprise disk arrays
• A scale-out software-defined storage solution
• A hyperconverged backup appliance
• An enterprise container solution based on (Kubernetes, Docker, and Jenkins)
• An automation and orchestration solution
• A bare-metal container implementation

We also regularly compare, for example, storage efficiency algorithms (deduplication & compression) across different solutions. For instance, the most efficient solution differs from the least efficient by a factor of 20x. This shows that not everything that glitters is gold!

Planned POCs

Further POCs are planned in our Innovation Lab for the next 12 months:

• Four object storage solutions based on S3
• A hybrid cloud orchestration solution
• A network virtualization approach with cloud connectivity at Layer 2

Innovation Lab infrastructure

The Innovation Lab also has permanently installed infrastructure that will be available long-term for demos and tests.

Visit us!

We would be pleased to invite you to our Innovation Lab in Spreitenbach and demonstrate our solution approaches live.

The following functionalities can be demonstrated:

• Infrastructure management
• System configurations
• Performance monitoring
• Monitoring and alerting