So what is an e-lab?

Before looking at how e-labs might fit into a technical training curriculum, let’s first clarify just what they are. ‘E-labs’ are ‘remote labs’, which are also ‘live labs’ – unfortunately there is no accepted, generic name as each vendor applies their own branding. The underlying principles are, however, broadly the same. E-labs allow learners the ability to interact freely with real network hardware and software over the Internet. Typically the learner is provided with a written description of a task to carry out and is then able to either configure network hardware or interact with server software in order to carry out the task in much the same way that they would if the equipment was sitting right in front of them.

Graham Shenton is Managing Director, EMEA, for e-labs pioneer, Logilent: “You can think of it as a giant timesharing service. We have a huge room full of kit including all the hardware and software that any student could need. For the Cisco curriculum, that includes some 600 routers, switches and so on. Students simply request the hardware that they need and this is allocated to them for the duration of their session, typically about 90 minutes.”

Logilent’s Founder and VP Development is David Clarke. He explains how the service originated: “We decided to use real hardware and software in our e-learning offerings back in 1994, since when 250,000 lab sessions have been completed. Hardware has been the most challenging problem, particularly as user volumes grow, but we now use a dynamic switching matrix so students can develop their own equipment configuration on the fly. This improves scalability by 400%, while providing students with the same feedback they would obtain in a live environment.”

Ray Geoghegan is VP e-Learning, EMEA, for Global Knowledge, whose ‘Remote Labs’ service was launched a year ago: “We have banks of servers operating under Linux, NT, Windows 2000 and Unix, with XP, .NET, SQL and Exchange Server coming by the end of Q3 2003. We have developed our own partitioning software to allow many different students access to the same computer.”

E-labs use online application sharing technology to make it possible for learners to interact with remote servers. This may start the bandwidth alarm bells ringing, but Shenton explains: “The labs work fine at 56K, but the interaction with the software is more realistic at double this rate or better. However, the Cisco labs work absolutely fine at 56K.”

Providing students with the ability to experiment as they wish with someone else’s hardware and software sounds risky. What happens when they bring the system down? Shenton: “It’s true that students can do as much damage as they can in a live environment, although they tend in practice to be quite responsible. Nevertheless, we have put in as many failsafes as we can, so we can usually recover from a crash in 10 minutes.”

So, e-labs would appear to be accessible, scalable and reliable, which doesn’t sound like any networking environment I know (only kidding). But how do they compare with the training solutions we’ve all grown to love?