Our original Green Bay lab mirrors a corporate campus/remote site: Half the network represents the company headquarters, the other half a branch office or the Internet at large. We use this facility primarily to test Layer 4 to Layer 7 traffic and network edge devices.
Last year, we spent a considerable amount of time and money creating
a lab within a lab in Green Bay. We use this new facility primarily to
test business applications in a 24/7 environment for a fictional widgets
manufacturer we call NWC
Inc. --so it's the only one of our labs that
isn't subjected to continual repurposing.
Syracuse, New York
Our Syracuse labs, on campus at Syracuse University, started as a single
room that housed a lone technology writer (Bruce Boardman, now our executive
editor) in Machinery Hall (MH) in 1993. Today, these labs house hundreds
of general-purpose 2U, two-processor Intel- and SPARC-based servers and
hundreds of 1U client machines, as well as specialized test equipment--traffic-generation
and WAN-simulation tools, for instance--from Spirent Communications, Shunra
Software and Ixia, large storage arrays from Snap Appliance, and several
dedicated systems for use in tests that involve Microsoft Exchange, Active
Directory, Novell eDirectory, LDAP servers and standards-based e-mail servers.
Chicago, Illinois
Back in the 1990s, our lab at Neohapsis headquarters housed just enough
gear to run periodic tests, primarily of security products--intrusion-detection
systems, firewalls and vulnerability-assessment suites, for instance. Today,
we have a full-scale testing environment capable of supporting at least
four tests on a variety of products simultaneously by striking a balance
between static gear--Check Point Software Technologies and Cisco firewalls;
Cisco routers; Cabletron, Cisco and Lucent Technologies switches; and Net
Optics taps and other hardware, plus Layer 7 benchmarking tools like Spirent's
products--and dynamic device pools--groups of switches, workstations and
servers that can be repurposed
REPORTS
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