Microsoft UK DCOE Uses Shunra Virtual Enterprise WAN Emulation for Deployment Solution Demonstrations and Proof of Concept Workshops

Microsoft’s UK Deployment Centre of Excellence extends their capabilities with Shunra, addressing the real world scenarios customers face during deployment.

Shunra Software, the global leader in WAN emulation technology, today announced that the Microsoft UK Deployment Centre of Excellence (DCOE) has adopted Shunra VE as their central WAN emulation solution, expanding their proof of concept capabilities to customers. Using Shunra, the DCOE is now able to address the real world scenarios their customers face by applying a replica of the customer’s actual wide area network to the testing phase, enabling customers to understand the exact end user experience before rollout.

The Microsoft UK DCOE is a dedicated resource which provides workshop style sessions for customers and partners to review their current deployment processes, short and longer term application performance goals, deployment hurdles, and perceived deployment issues, then relate these to the ‘art of the possible’, Microsoft deployment’s best practices and infrastructure roadmap. The DCOE environment provides the facilities to demonstrate deployment solutions, delivering client and server operating systems plus applications, configuration and user data and setting migration. The DCOE utilizes diverse hardware types to replicate real world challenges faced by customers and partners.

The DCOE, going through an ‘environment refresh,’ needed to extend their capabilities to provide demonstrations of solutions which addressed the real world scenarios their customers were facing, including: deployment and management of applications in branch and remote environments; network impairments; and reduced bandwidth and resources. These constraints introduce unique technical and support challenges for customers and the Centre identified this as a core requirement in their new environment design.

The DCOE chose Shunra VE as their core WAN emulation tool. Not only does Shunra meet their original design requirements, but the advanced reporting and market proven accuracy delivers a number of additional testing opportunities.

“The Shunra STN forms a fundamental component of our new DCOE environment. It allows us to provide predefined demonstrations which accurately reflect head office and branch type scenarios and differing variations on deployment and management based around these, as per our original intentions,” said Keith Baker, security and management deployment specialist, Microsoft UK. “In addition to this core functionality, we are able to use some of the Shunra VE advanced capabilities to offer more specific proof of concept work replicating a customer’s actual environment by recording the physical network characteristics at the customer location and then replaying this and recreating the client environment within the DCOE.”

Currently, Shunra Software is the only company to provide both hardware and software WAN emulation solutions with market-leading best practices for application development and performance testing. Increased demand for consistent and reliable enterprise application performance drives customers like the DCOE to fully incorporate Shunra VE into their testing processes.

“We worked closely with the Microsoft Deployment Centre of Excellence to provide a flexible platform to quickly emulate their customer’s network environments which in turn provides end-users the ability to deploy the diverse set of Microsoft products faster and more reliably to meet the high level of quality of experience that Microsoft’s customers are accustomed to,” said Ben Boulnois, Shunra VP EMEA.

“Shunra VE has not only allowed us to meet our original aims, but has presented the possibility for the DCOE effectiveness to be greatly enhanced for future engagements,” concluded Keith.

About Shunra Software

Shunra Software is the market leader in WAN emulation solutions for application performance testing throughout the entire application development lifecycle. Shunra’s award–winning solutions enable development, quality assurance, pre-deployment and operations teams to create an exact replica of their production environment or design what-if network scenarios; allowing them to predict exactly how applications or infrastructure changes will perform in any networked environment—before rollout. Shunra’s solutions and services are typically deployed in projects including data center consolidation; application performance readiness testing; VoIP testing; website testing and WAN optimization technology testing.

Shunra’s solutions and services are used by thousands of customers worldwide. Clients include 3M, Boeing, Cisco, Dow Chemical, EMC, FedEx, General Motors, JPMorgan Chase, Kelly Services, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, Nestle, Pitney Bowes, and Vodafone. Shunra has offices in New York City, Philadelphia, Israel, Singapore and the UK. Shunra is also supported through a global network of channel partners. For more information on Shunra, please visit www.shunra.com.

Shunra is a trademark of Shunra Software Ltd. All other trademarks and registered trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

Contacts

Shunra Software
Rhoan Morgan, 267-519-5109
rhoan.morgan {at} shunra(.)com