Lab/testing time

[Pete Kruckenberg <pete () kruckenberg com>]

I'm putting together a justication for additional lab
equipment and personnel, and would be interested what an
average network engineering group spends in terms of budget
and personnel on a lab and people to run it, as a percentage
of overall budget.

This would be primarily for main-stream issues (software
testing, configuration testing), as opposed to
new-vendor/bleeding-edge lab work.

I'm also interested if there are significant variations
between these costs with various vendors. Are the
lab/testing costs significantly different if I were
primarily using vendor X vs. vendor Y, and how would costs
for a pure X vendor network compare to a X+Y multivendor
network?

Thanks.
Pete.