Data centre specialist Ahead has announced a US$5 million expansion of its multi-site in-house cloud lab to educate clients on the virtualisation, storage, cloud and network technologies shaping the next-generation data centre. The new hybrid-cloud lab in Ahead’s Chicago headquarters features a multi-vendor infrastructure that makes it possible to compare competing technologies side by side as well as demonstrate the precise combination of solutions appropriate to a client’s needs.

The lab’s aggregation of virtualisation, storage, compute and network technologies allows Ahead to illustrate the integration points between different layers of the data centre stack. This capability – critical for understanding the benefits of next-generation data centre infrastructure – offers a key advantage over the typical strategy of test-driving components through individual vendors’ labs.

Source: Ahead