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.
Active Directory serves as NWC Inc.'s corporate directory; Microsoft Exchange 2000 provides mail and calendaring. Our critical database is IBM DB2 7.2 running on Windows 2000, with Oracle9i and SQL Server 2000 supplying ancillary functionality. These core applications run on Dell 2650 servers on both Windows and Red Hat Linux platforms. They communicate with each other over a copper Gigabit backbone and with the rest of the world over a Cisco Catalyst 4500 and 7401 ASR router.
NWC Inc.'s customer-facing Web application is implemented in PHP and is served by an Apache Web server running on Red Hat 7.3 on a Dell 1650 server. Our IBM WebSphere 4.01 Application Server runs on Windows 2000 and provides core transaction functionality. Web services are provided by Cape Clear Software's CapeConnect. Our corporate CRM (customer relationship management) application is Accpac 5.5 CRM running on IIS 5.0 and Windows 2000 Server.
Chicago
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. We kept a minimal set of devices up and running full time, but reconfigured most of our equipment for each project to avoid logistical nightmares.
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