In some settings the word "lab" conjures up sterile images of long, stainless-steel countertops, white rats and even whiter lab coats.

Click to see: InteropLabs logo

The HotStage event for the 2006 InteropLabs takes place in a drafty warehouse in Belmont, Calif., and is more about long racks of networking gear, box monkeys and T-shirts and jeans - but the work is nonetheless pretty valuable.

InteropLabs is the experimental portion of the Interop show network.

In it, dozens of experienced network engineers test hundreds of commercial and open source products, focusing on how the gear can work together peacefully on a corporate network.

The testing culminates in a series of formal demonstrations on the show floor this week in Las Vegas, but the testing process itself provides a window into how these products integrate standard protocols, as well as the hoops you may need to jump through to get them working as a coherent whole on your own network.

As the media sponsor of InteropLabs, Network World gets exclusive access to the testing results from the InteropLabs HotStage event that took place in early April.

The three focal points of this year's InteropLabs demonstration areas explored these questions:

• Can the network access control (NAC) products being touted by almost every security vendor today actually work together to fulfill the promise of a safer network?
• What happens when previously interoperable VoIP devices go to work in decidedly unfriendly environments, such as through security devices with network address translation turned on or across wireless LAN links?
• Can open source operating systems and applications integrate with existing Windows environments for a peaceful, manageable corporate network? (See "Mix-and-match open source for corporate networks.")

We've placed Network World Lab Alliance partner Joel Snyder on the NAC team, alliance partner David Newman on the VoIP team and alliance partner Rodney Thayer on the open source team.

Read on to find the lessons learned from these significant testing endeavors.