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.

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.