My thanks the the following sponsors who have contributed equipment to my lab:

In addition to the equipment listed below, I can get almost anything for the duration of a review, including traffic generators from Sprient and Antara. I have excellent relationships with several server vendors, network hardware vendors, fibre channel vendors and software vendors. There are several racks available for mounting equipment as necessary.

Test Equipment and Software

Ixia 1600 with 8 SC gigabit Ethernet ports, 8 10/100 Ethernet ports, 8-port TXS board for layer seven testing, Shunra Virtual Enterprise WAN simulator. Simulation software including WebLoad 6.

Servers

Eight single- and dual-processor Xeon servers with at least 2GB RAM, 36GB or more of disk space, all with dual GigE and Fibre Channel adapters. Additional older servers from PII/500 to PIII/733, with 256-512MB RAM and 9-18GB of disk space. Two SATA RAID-based file servers, one with 2TB capacity, one with 4TB capacity. Sun v210.

Server OS's available for testing: Windows 2000 and 2003 Advanced Server and Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Server 3, SuSE 10.1 and NetWare 6.5, Solaris 9 and 10.

Other software includes: current versions of all Microsoft server applications.

Clustering Test Bed

RLX 300e blade system with 10 blades, each with Transmeta CPU, 512MB RAM, 20GB HD. Compaq CL1850R two-node shared SCSI cluster.

Workstations

Eight workstations of at least P4 2.8GHz speed with at least 512MB RAM, plus a variety of older systems.

Network Hardware

32 ports of gigabit Ethernet, 802.11b access point and two PC cards.

Storage Hardware

QLogic or Emulex HBAs in all servers, 16-port QLogic 5200 2Gbps Fibre Channel Switch, Nexsan SATABlade 3TB fibre channel RAID.