How we did it
 
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Our lab's test environment for this review consisted of six Fast Ethernet subnet domains connected via Cisco and Ascend routers across T-1, Frame Relay and Covad synchronous DSL links. We also ran the tool's discovery processes on a 50,000 node nationwide network centered in New York City.
The lab network included a range of systems, including Windows 98/Millennium Edition/NT/2000, RedHat Linux 6.2, Macintosh System 8 and OS/2 Warp 4.0. Relational databases on the network were Oracle 8i, IBM DB2 Universal Database 6.0, Sybase Adaptive Server 11.5 and Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server 2000. We evaluated each product's ability to help a network administrator discover, design, simulate, document, map and measure a network.
We ran each network design and planning tool on one to three Gateway NS-8000 computers with 333-MHz Pentium II dual processors, 512M bytes of RAM and three 9G bytes SCSI RAID drives. In each case, the operating system platform was NT Server 4.0 with Service Pack 6. An Agilent Advisor protocol analyzer generated packets as well as decoded and displayed network traffic.
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