What happened to the Performance Harness Project?
Some of you have emailed asking what has happened to the Performance Harness Project I started writing about a few months ago. I wanted to give you all an update…
The project started as something I was spearheading myself, and has since taken on a life of it’s own. It’s now an official project with larger involvement, which means that it slows down a bit 
I hope to have some more details in early January as we flesh out the new architecture we’ll be using for the system.
Developers on my team have spent the last month prototyping a new reservation and scheduling system that will allow us to control more devices from a central point within our automation. This will include things like L1/L2/L3 switches, our own product, and various test harnesses from IXIA, Spirent, ANUE, and others. Part of this framework will be used in this new harness. What we foresee right now is a mixed harness – automated build testing during the day using our customized framework, and more complex customer scenarios during the night, using IXIA Test Conductor.
We have set aside two brand-new IXIA Acceleron-NP cards for this project – a huge amount of test capacity (more than 7 times what we originally had dedicated to the project) and re-tooled some of the ANUE and Spirent equipment involved. We also may be adding some larger 10GB switches to support the different devices we’re planning on testing.
More details in a few weeks!