Rent-A-Lab has come a long way. When virtualization.info and its Swiss partner Kybernetika launched it almost four years ago the goal was to build an enterprise-class lab where to test latest virtualization products.
Targeting a global audience of professionals that are perpetually on the road, busy at some industry trade shows or at a customer site, we wanted a fast, worldwide accessible facility.
But most of all, we wanted a lab stuffed with next generation hardware, that could help the industry vanguard in evaluating the features and performance of tomorrow’s data center technologies.
The market answered in a phenomenal way, well beyond our expectations. To address the demand, we moved from just 9 rackmount servers to 20, then to 40.
We didn’t just added more servers, we’ve also upgraded (or replaced) the existing ones, continuing to offer one of the most cutting-edge IT infrastructure of the entire Europe.
To achieve the goal, we’ve invested a lot on our own, but we’ve asked the help of the most prominent vendors in the industry. We’ve got impressive support, moving from a single sponsor to 15, which provided all sort of hardware and software equipment, from SAN to firewalls, to glass Internet connection.
VMware and Cisco even selected RAL as their preferred location to run the first UCS Bootcamp in Switzerland.
Now it’s time for the next step: Rent-A-Lab becomes Datacenter on Demand (DonD).
Over the last few months, the datacenter has been moved in a new location in Zurich downtown, where it meets very stringent requirements from the Swiss government.
Concurrently, the infrastructure has been expanded to 46 rackmount servers (from HP) plus 28 blades across 4 chassis (from Cisco). These machines are backed by 4 different kind of SANs (from Dell EqualLogic, EMC, HP and NetApp) with a few terabyte of storage available.
More than that, DonD is connected to Internet with 25MBit symmetric DLS and 100MBit glass connection from two different providers.
With 558 cores, 38TB of SAN storage, 1056 LAN ports and 208 Fibre Channel ports, 120kW of cooling power and UPS systems able to provide up to 95kW, it’s easy to understand that the name change reflects the significant expansion of the Rent-A-Lab project.
And because we’ve always eaten our own dog food, we’ve decided to move virtualization.info and cloudcomputing.info on DonD too. Both are proudly hosted there since this summer.
To celebrate, we’ll have a small event this Thursday (German language only, sorry) at the DonD headquarters, with 250 of our closest friends, customers, partners and sponsors. The Swiss press will be present too.
We’ll hardly have more capacity, but if you are interested in attending let us know.
Of course we have more in queue. Stay tuned!