Industry
—Information Technologies
Solution
—CloudShell Pro
How Dell EMC Networking Reduced Annual Equipment Depreciation Expense by Approximately 25% Using CloudShell Pro
Reduced annual depreciation expense by approximately 25%
Increased lab utilization by 75%
Provided engineers, across multiple development sites with the ability to make 300+ test bed reservations on-demand each day
Challenge
Dell EMC Networking’s R&D Ops team, which includes Joe Saunders and Brian Turner, are responsible for asset lifecycle management of Dell EMC Networking’s Opex and Capex investments amidst a rapidly growing portfolio of new product introductions.
With no equipment reservation system to enable sharing and visibility of high-value, expensive lab and test equipment, lab space, power, and HVAC cooling systems, Dell EMC Networking was underutilizing its lab assets and generating unnecessary lab expansion and upgrade expense.
Joe Saunders
Senior DevOps Engineer, Dell EMC Networking
“With Quali’s CloudShell Pro, users can build and manage topologies built from test-bed devices in the lab or pre-made templates through Quali’s CloudShell web portal. We can find equipment that is no longer used, retire it from our finance depreciation schedule, thereby eliminating the need to add additional costly lab infrastructure. There’s nothing out there like Quali.”
This high annual depreciation expense took away investment dollars that could instead fund additional new programs.
Lastly, the cycle time for onboarding and retiring assets was a manual process that could take a week or more to complete.
Joe and Brian saw an opportunity to significantly reduce the business unit depreciation expense and put controls on how much equipment they had available in their lab at any time, all while providing their teams with the test beds they needed.
Solution
Joe and Brian wanted a way to systematically manage and optimize the assets they had in their labs and make sure that they could dynamically reserve, share, spin-up, and decommission equipment efficiently.
Dell EMC Networking chose Quali’s CloudShell Pro to meet the needs of the reservation system and coupled it with RFID technology to manage, real-time, physical assets in their labs.
Results
Since implementing CloudShell Pro in 2013, Dell EMC Networking has seen significant improvements in productivity and lab utilization.
With Quali’s, CloudShell Pro, Dell EMC Networking has:
- Reduced annual depreciation expense by approximately 25%
- Increased lab utilization by 75%
- Provided engineers, across multiple development sites with the ability to make 300+ test bed reservations on-demand each day
- Enabled rapid detection of devices that are not utilized based on reservation to hibernate devices with a saved known state to quickly repower when required
- Eliminated costly facility expansion investment