David Barak wrote:
Consider for a moment a large retail chain, with several hundred or a couple thousand locations. How big a lab should they have before deciding to roll out a new network something-or-other? Should their lab be 1:10 scale? A more realistic figure is that they'll consider themselves lucky to be between 1:50 and 1:100, and that lab is probably understaffed at best. Having a dedicated lab manager is often seen as an expensive luxury, and many businesses don't have the margin to support it.
At the very least they should have a complete mock location (for an IT perspective) in a lab. Identical copies of all local servers and a carbon copy of their official template network. This is how AOL does it. Every change is tested in the mock remote site before the official template is changed and the template is pushed out to all the production sites.
Justin
