Trite but true: Your company's data is its most important asset. This applies to your databases, data files, e-mail stores and yes, even router configurations. The infrastructure device settings you've meticulously and painstakingly programmed into your routers, switches and firewalls deserve as much careful management as your databases.

Uplogix says its Envoy network appliance automatically collects, saves and restores configuration settings for some popular routers, switches and firewalls. The appliance also can maintain, apply and roll back device operating-system upgrades, the vendor says. The Envoy appliance also can monitor devices for connectivity and reboot a router, switch or firewall to reestablish broken network pathways.

To evaluate these claims, we tested an Envoy in our lab (see " How we did it"). Although the Envoy appliance did manage our device configurations successfully, it left us hungry for a better user interface, better reports, smarter monitoring and the ability to audit and analyze device configurations before applying those settings.

Infrastructure management

Like Cisco's Router and Security Device Manager (SDM) and other Cisco router-configuration software tools, an Envoy can save and restore a device's configuration settings and manage IOS version upgrades. Unlike SDM, an Envoy can work with popular models of Nortel, Juniper, TippingPoint (now 3Com) and Tasman routers, switches and firewalls, in addition to Cisco devices.

The Envoy lacks SDM's ability to analyze and report on a router's configuration, but its direct connection to each device's serial port gives the Envoy immediate feedback regarding the device's health, without the need to poll a router, switch or firewall (SDM lacks any monitoring capability). Envoy's looking through router or switch-log entries for statistics and announcements worked well. Its monitoring strategy is more like screen scraping (via each device's console port) than the SNMP- and ping-based approaches that typical network-monitoring tools use.

The appliance is a lightweight, 1U rack-mountable unit that can monitor as many as four network devices through four serial and four Ethernet ports. It also has a console port, Ethernet management port, modem (serial) port and power control port. Out of band, via a VPN-supported dial-up modem port, we could send commands to the Envoy and query its health.