About Us
We are Lab Services, an in-house service and infrastructure provider at Lucerne School of Computer Science and Information Technology.
Roughly summarized, we do the following:
- Data Center Operation
- We are running a full-fledged data center to deliver our services and realize our virtualized learning environments.
- Virtualized Learning Environments
- We are planning and implementing virtualized learning environments (so-called labs) for lectures.
- Laboratory Exercises
- We develop, test, support and assist hands-on lab exercises for lectures.
- Technical Consulting
- We provide technical consulting on feasibility and implementation options.
- Network Laboratories
- We maintain 4 network labs for hands-on learning in the area of networks and security.
Our team consists of 8 IT professionals and 7 part-time students, all employed by HSLU and sharing a common goal: to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical education.
The journey of Lab Services began in 2023, when two pre-existing teams, the Enterprise Lab and the NISLAB, joined their forces and decided to form Lab Services.
Foundation of NISLAB
The Cisco Academy initially launched to offer education and training in Cisco networking technologies. Over time, it evolved into the ‹Network and Information Security Lab›, commonly abbreviated as NISLAB.
Foundation of Enterprise Lab
The Enterprise Lab started as a ‹Sun Center of Excellence› and established the first in-house data center that was primarily operated for students by students. The aim was to integrate server hardware and software into the curriculum in a practical way and to make new technologies such as virtualization more tangible.
Expansion of Enterprise Lab's Data Center
One thing led to another and Enterprise Lab received its first mainframe server, an innovative cooling system and further hardware, allowing it to host even more workloads.
Strong focus on IT automation
The NISLAB begins to automate the provisioning using Ansible, Terraform, Packer and more in order to focus on the advancement of cutting edge labs. Given that the Enterprise Lab hosted the virtual machines for NISLAB, they also intensified the use of various automation tools.
Milestone: 2000 VMs per semester
The Enterprise Lab breaks the 2000 virtual machines per semester mark, not only but also thanks to the NISLAB which continuously expands its services to more lectures.
Merge of Enterprise Lab and NISLAB
At the end of summer 2023, NISLAB and Enterprise Lab merged, creating Lab Services which replaced the previous two teams to take full advantage of the synergies.
New Data Center
The year 2024 marks the start of planning and building of a new data center to accommodate our growing needs for compute and storage due to our consistently growing number of students.