As vendor agnostic IT consultants serving large enterprises in healthcare and other industries, T2 Tech Group’s engineering team must work with a vast array of technologies. Due to our company’s growth, we recently moved to a new headquarters facility. With the new office, our leadership made a multimillion dollar investment in a powerful onsite data center, the T2 Tech Lab. This state-of-the-art lab features hardware from leading manufacturers and is now a valuable and cost-saving resource for our clients.

Our team uses the lab to build and test the industry’s best technology, allowing us to provide our clients with a pilot environment before going live. By giving them a shop that is ready to create a staging environment and simulate their states, we can provide the following benefits to clients:

  • Reduce the amount of time required to get loaner equipment
  • Rehearse implementations to better prepare
  • Reduce change-related risks by testing

At no additional cost to the client, this service furthers our end goal of efficiently providing optimal technology solutions.

Using the lab to benefit our clients

Organizations come to us because they need additional resources and want to leverage our expertise. The T2 Tech Lab allows us to buildout virtual environments or configure hardware that can simulate a future-state status. This allows the client organization to utilize the simulated environment to perform their own application testing or piloting.

One of our current clients is leveraging the lab to help streamline a data center migration. For the relocation, the organization needs to test out the different methods of migrating each application and the time and effort it would take to move them.

When you move data centers, there’s multiple ways to copy the data. The first thing we’ll do is try different methods and see what the different results are. Next, we will determine how long it takes and how to migrate without user disruption.

By leveraging the T2 Tech Lab, we can conduct the necessary tests while helping the client prepare for executing the data center migration. This piloting allows us to see if they need to update or make any changes before implementation, and it will help streamline the migration and minimize business impact.

Leveraging the lab to implement the latest solutions

From my perspective as an engineer, the lab also provides a great opportunity to learn more about optimally leveraging the latest technologies for clients. To hone their expertise, engineers like to take a hands-on approach to facilitate the understanding of new technologies. The lab brings this experience in-house, so we are prepared for our clients’ biggest challenges when they arise.

With the lab, we can pilot the experience our customers will face when they undertake a migration. For instance, we are currently using the lab to configure Cisco ACI for a client’s data center. We’re building out different configurations of Cisco ACI to determine the best solution for the new data center setup.

Looking to the future

Because of the acceleration of technology, the lab gives us the ability to validate changes before implementing them into production. In addition, my peers and I have the opportunity to use some of the latest technologies in a way offered by only a handful of companies.

The lab is now part of a large toolset T2 Tech’s vendor agnostic team will utilize to provide the best design and implementation solutions. Aligned with our client-centric focus, this tool ensures technology improvement projects seamlessly get put in place and provide immediate value.

To learn more about the T2 Tech Lab, watch our video.