PacketBrain - Training and Consulting

For most students, the hands-on lab experience is the most valuable part of the training session. Your IT staff wants access to real Cisco hardware and software, along with the ability to experiment, discover, and explore under the guidance of a seasoned professional. We have heard these statements week in and week out during a decade of Cisco training.

Unlike our competitors who are often trying to cut corners, PacketBrain never uses "simulated" labs or lab gear that is "locked down" to specific canned configurations - things that frustrate students and instructors alike and inhibit the learning experience.

                                      At PacketBrain, lab quality is our top priority.

• Two Quad-core 2.33GHz CPUs
  • Our servers are blazing fast. Each server contains two Quad-core 2.33GHz CPUs, 16GB of RAM, and 10k RPM SAS drives.
• Our data stores for our lab images are built on VMWare VMFS data stores accessed via iSCSI. We use what we teach!
• We monitor delay and rate limit the bandwidth on a per-student basis and are able to intelligently adjust to changing bandwidth requirements on the fly.
• Students can remotely control the power for all devices in their pod - turning them on and off as if they were physically in front of the device. Not only does this create a real-world experience for the students, it also contributes to our Green initiative at PacketBrain.
• Students also access the console of each physical device as if they were physically in front of that device. Again, this allows the students to gain real world experience on how to configure new devices shipped directly from the factory.
• We operate out of a Class A data center with a UPS that is tested weekly and a backup diesel generator.
• The Internet connections from our data center are dual-homed using BGP to two different Tier 1 ISPs. The physical circuits run over fiber with no repeaters between us and the ISP Point of Presence.