Because we've designed NWC Inc. as a company with a significant Web presence, we'll also use the new production environment to do in-depth Web services reviews and workshops. During the past year we've been saying that Web services will be an important new tool that can drop dollars to your bottom line. NWC Inc. will let us explore the strengths and weaknesses of Web services so you can make better decisions about when and how to deploy them.
Ramped Up
We've got a number of plans for using the new lab. For example, business tools like enterprise application integration and CRM will be introduced to the NWC Inc. infrastructure this year, plus we'll run a Workshop on upgrading common business applications. Associate technology editor and storage guru Steve Schuchart plans to explore offsite backup in the context of NWC Inc., and SNMP wiz Bruce Boardman will leverage the new infrastructure to dig even deeper into the world of proactive network management. When we look at portal software, we'll test integration with NWC Inc.'s "legacy" applications.
To learn more about the day-to-day operations of NWC Inc., and the product and integration decisions we made, read on. Share the details of NWC Inc.'s physical infrastructure, including air conditioning, premises security and power, as well as our hardware implementation and the software systems. Also visit NWC Inc. online, at inc.networkcomputing.com, for a blog and a live Web cam. As we use the lab to hammer business applications, you can follow along step by step online.
Ron Anderson is Network Computing's lab director. Before joining the staff, he managed IT in various capacities at Syracuse University and for the Veteran's Administration. Write to him at [email protected].
Back in January we had an idea: Build an extension of our Real-World Labs® in Green Bay, Wis., to handle business-application testing, so we'd be able to pound on business software as hard as we bang on network hardware. That way we could evaluate integration and deployment issues in a true 24x7 business environment. Just shy of a year later, we're standing in the middle of that lab, looking at some sweet hardware supporting the production environment of NWC Inc.
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