Interested in Working with the NTG Lab?
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@scottalanmiller said:
We were kicking around ideas today on a lab team call discussing maybe using the hosted free Spiceworks product to do a lab ticketing system and letting people take on lab roles rather like admins for different tasks, like have a SAN Admin responsible for carving out LUNs. So someone using the lab could request a LUN via a ticket and it would all get documented and done kind of like an enterprise environment. This would make it easier to manage the lab and, more importantly, make the lab experience far more valuable by providing something closer to actual experience rather than just playing around with equipment.
I love this idea.
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@coliver said:
The 25$/month thing is going to be the sticking point for me... got some good new the other day that is going to tie my money up for a longish time. Not sure I can afford the 25$/month at this point.
Unfortunately there is a rather heavy bit of cost to cover. Going to be rather than expensive endeavor with a full cabinet being used in a datacenter. Will provide for some amazing capabilities and growth, but it's a non-trivial expense to run it all.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
The 25$/month thing is going to be the sticking point for me... got some good new the other day that is going to tie my money up for a longish time. Not sure I can afford the 25$/month at this point.
Unfortunately there is a rather heavy bit of cost to cover. Going to be rather than expensive endeavor with a full cabinet being used in a datacenter. Will provide for some amazing capabilities and growth, but it's a non-trivial expense to run it all.
Understood. I would have to look at the expense when this gets going to see if it is doable for me.
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Maybe even pair people up in roles they've never held before... like putting me with somebody who has lots of XenServer experience... and then pairing me up with somebody who does not have a lot of Hyper-V experience...
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@anonymous said:
@scottalanmiller What the monthly cost? How you consider other options? Storing it at someones workspace?
Sure, but the cost of running the gear in an office is higher in terms of electricity and connectivity. So that doesn't work. Powering and cooling a lab of this scale isn't trivial in any way. And not having good filtered air and HVAC and UPS and all that means that the equipment is far more expensive to operate.
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@anonymous said:
@scottalanmiller What the monthly cost? How you consider other options? Storing it at someones workspace?
No matter where it resides physically there will costs for power, cooling, network, bandwidth, etc.
I know that I do not run my lab at home so that I do not have to bear those costs. My gear is in a collocation rack in St. Louis currently, but the availability of that space could be lost at any time and then I will have to work up a new solution.
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Commercially, I'd love to use this for production "demos" to clients.
Show them "This is your network on a SAN" watch me break it
Then show them "This is your well designed proper network, watch me break it and recover from it quickly.
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@JaredBusch said:
@anonymous said:
@scottalanmiller What the monthly cost? How you consider other options? Storing it at someones workspace?
No matter where it resides physically there will costs for power, cooling, network, bandwidth, etc.
But not costs to us. Hosting it in an office we have to pay for those things and from what we've seen in NY, they cost more alone than the full cots of hosting in a DC where all of those costs are predictable and included.
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I am assuming that the monthly charge would be to help off-set the costs or completely cover them?
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@dafyre said:
I am assuming that the monthly charge would be to help off-set the costs or completely cover them?
It would take a lot of people to cover the cost. It's just to offset as much as possible.
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I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this, sounds like a really interesting idea!
Especially since I've been wanting some hands-on experience with Scale hardware...
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@WingCreative I'm ready to see their 5.x series firmware (I forget what they call it now, lol). Their 4.3 series was awesome!
My buddies at my last job are tyring to figure out how to do 4.3 -> 5.x since it is a destructive upgrade. O.o
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I like the idea, may be there can be a catalog which can be published for us to know whats available, and probably post results/how to if interested here in ML with the project details.
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I posted some of the details of the current lab detail up above. More will be added in the future, or swapped out or changed. It's not a static thing, but once in a datacenter the change rate will drop considerably.
Hoping to rack an old SunFire V100 with FreeBSD too.
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Want to see one of these bad boys or maybe even a larger system in as part of the Solaris lab. Real Solaris on Sparc with CoolThreads (Sparc T / Niagara) processors. Would not be a massive system, but it is a RISC / minicomputer for the lab and would be able to run the very latest Solaris OS and be a virtualization platform for Sparc/RISC which would be awesome for people to get to touch both at the OS and at the hardware level. Don't know any labs running this class of gear in the SMB.
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I forgot to mention that there would be a range of backup software and tools in the lab too, perfect for learning about those technologies as well. Physical Unitrends appliances are in the lab and we will have StorageCraft software there as well. Probably more, but those right from the beginning.
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It has been a month now... Any more info on this moving forward?
If not, what about using the existing NTG Labs for something like this?
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We are waiting on a few key pieces of hardware to arrive. Once they do we will be moving everything to our Colo.
