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We're a week shy of the Academy Awards, the Hollywood gala featuring superstars in their glittery Versace gowns and Armani tuxes. While you won't find any sequins here, our 2003 Best of the Tests Award does honor comparably big winners - stars of the computer screen, you could say.
Through this Best of the Tests Award, our fifth annual, we honor the products that performed exceptionally well in our tests last year. The winners all have survived rigorous, hands-on testing in one - sometimes two or three if it's a distributed evaluation - of our 14 Network World Lab Alliance partner facilities or in Senior Reviews Editor Keith Shaw's lab. All, too, offer critical network services.
In 2003, we tested more than 240 products from more than 200 vendors.
To narrow that wide field to our 61 finalists, we considered how the products fared in comparative tests on performance, management capabilities and ease of use. We also accounted for unique features that lifted any product above the fray.
Once we had our finalists, we then selected which specific product deserved the Best of the Tests honor. We considered the overall usefulness of the products when deployed in a large-scale network, and those that had multiple tools for getting the job done weighted greater than point products focused on a single task.
Products fell into these categories:
And now, for the moment you've all been waiting for. To see what products the awards go to, click on the above links.
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Copyright 2008 Network World Inc.
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