--- On Tue, 1/6/09, Justin Shore <jus...@justinshore.com> wrote: > 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.
I don't disagree at all: that is a straightforward way to anticipate *most* problems. What is does not and cannot validate is whether there is a scaling issue, and this is what doing "live" testing does give you. David Barak Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise: http://www.listentothefranchise.com