Virtually all our testing took place across 512kbps frame relay, T-1 and T-3 WAN links. The testbed network consisted of six Fast Ethernet subnet domains routed by Cisco routers. Our lab's 150 clients used computing platforms that included Windows NT/98/2000/2003/ME/XP/Vista, Red Hat Linux and Macintosh OS X. AIX and Solaris computers were also part of the network. The relational databases on the network were Oracle 8i, IBM DB2 Universal Database, Sybase Adaptive Server 12.5 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. The network also contained three Web servers (Microsoft IIS, Netscape Enterprise Server and Apache), three e-mail servers (Exchange, Notes and Sendmail) and two file servers (Windows 2003 Advanced Server and Netware).

A Compaq ProLiant ML570 computer with four 900 MHz CPUs, 2GB RAM and 135GB hard disks, running Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2003 Advanced Server and, at other times, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, was our test platform for all the products' server components.

We assessed each product in the following areas:
• Asset auditing and inventory management.
• Operating system deployment and configuration.
• Virtual machine management capabilities.
• Software license monitoring.
• Software distribution and patch management.
• Remote control capabilities.
• Mobile device management.
• Network access control capabilities.
• Desktop vulnerability threat analysis.
• Host-based intrusion detection.
• Virus detection and removal, or management ties to a third-party AV product.
• Spyware detection, removal and blocking, or management ties to a third-party antispyware product.
• USB Device management.
• Backup and recovery features

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