Our customer is a US-based company providing system level solutions for high-performance networking, storage and clustering performance on a single network fabric. Their products enable server and storage vendors to provide their data center customers with superior performance and compatibility with their existing Ethernet infrastructure.

Project Overview:

This project involved development of automated testing infrastructure and software QA services for a variety of protocol stack and drivers for high speed Ethernet communications in the Data Centers. Our offshore center acted as a virtual extension to our customer's Software QA team. The main focus of this project was development of automated testing infrastructure running 24X7 for various different configuration and platforms, software QA of customer's upper layer protocols and development of interfaces.

Customer concerns addressed by eInfochips:

• Streamlining QA setup and processes for SDK testing on multiple configuration
• Testing more than 200 test configurations daily, that were not possible manually
• Execution time for testing individual SDK
• Turn around time for changes and testing them with conjunction with other modules
• Framework for extendible and scalable processes

eInfochips Role:

Software QA and Test Automation

Platforms

• 32 bit P3/P4, 64 bit Opteron Processors
• Uni / Multi Processor Configurations
• Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2003 Server, Linux 2.4.20-8, Linux 2.6 (Multi Boot Configurations)

Protocols

• TCP/IP, IWARP, DAPL, MPI, RDMA Verbs, RNIC, WSD

Automation Framework

• Platform independent utilities in Tcl / Expect and Perl o TCL 'C' Extensions used for test application
• Automatic test case generation and analysis
• Automatic reboot and image selection of various Operating System variants o Continuous 24X7 execution facility and robust infrastructure
• Advanced logging options o Automatic and runtime generation of drivers to test the stack o Infrastructure for automatic build of SDK with the automation tool
• More than 200 different configurations support
• Flexible and Extendible framework (No change required to support new drivers testing)
• Drastic reduction in test execution time
• Automatic history file creation for reporting purpose

Software QA

• QA of customer's SDK
• Maintenance of various samples for different drivers and protocols
• Sockets and iWarp Stack QA for user space and kernel space
• Advanced QA for performance measurements and protocol conformance
• QA of upper layer protocol e.g. DAPL, MPI, WSD
• 3rd Party Test Automation o Microsoft (WHQL) and Red Hat Certification Testing (HCT) for the drivers
• Thorough test case documentation along with test matrix, result history and execution graphs per target configuration

Tools Used

• ActiveTCL and ActivePerl with Expect
• Ltools (For supporting automatic multi boot image selection)
• Shutdown Utility for Windows
• Windows and Linux Telnet Servers
• KVM / IP for remote management of multiple servers
• VNC for remote monitoring of individual servers
• Power Distribution Units (For remote automatic power reboot support)

Test Automation Framework

SNMP based Management Agent Development

eInfochips developed SNMP based management interface for customer's SDK and hardware. CIM (WMI) compliant management interface was developed both on Windows and Linux platforms (Net-SNMP compliant).

eInfochips SNMP development role

• Management interface support for RNIC hardware and software
• Support of RFC 1213 MIB II group for RNIC hardware and software consisting of Systems, Interfaces, Transmission (dot3), TCP, IP, UDP, RDMA and RMON groups.
• Solution for both Linux and Windows platform
• Creating requirements for low level APIs to be implemented by customer.
• Integrating and testing the RNIC SNMP extension sub agents with commercial management application like HP OpenView.

WSD Development

eInfochips developed upper layer protocol WSD (WinSock Direct) module for Microsoft platform. WSD fits between Windows Socket Switch and driver given by SAN provider. WSD maps the function calls given by Switch and properly routes it to the SAN provider, so that User can take benefits of High speed SAN network without making any change in existing socket application.

eInfochips WSD development role

• Taking the existing code base and port it for new iWarp interface
• Provide support for Port Mapper Prococol implementation and other implementation gaps in the existing code base.
• Test WSD module against Microsoft HCT certification (WHQL Tests)
• Working closely with customers' development team to figure out and resolve issues related with HCT tests and support of iWarp interface

Customer Benefits

Our customer gained numerous benefits from the successful project engagement

• Improved quality of the software and drivers helped in substantial cost saving
• Reliable and quality time to market solution
• Generic and extendible automated test infrastructure
• Rapid scaling of development team on short notice
• Schedule recovery by augmenting customer's capabilities for providing content creation
• Enabled working demo for event participation
• 24X7 QA cycle
• Drastically reduced the test execution time
• Extended QA on multiple configurations and platforms with minimal efforts
• Timely automated emails with the status of builds, sanity, and validation tests on each SDK every
• Scalable framework for multiple machines