by Christine Burns

Director, Network World Test Alliance

2007 Best of the Tests headliners

Feature

Feb 26, 20074 mins

A dozen products bubble to the top of the more than 120 reviewed last year by Network World testers

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Product category	CLIENT MANAGEMENT
Score	4.4 out of 5 (get the test results)
Lab Alliance tester		Paul Ferrill, independent consultant
Best of the Tests distinction	LANDesk Management Suite 8.6 took home the honors in our highly popular client management test because of its wide platform support, ease of deployment, beefed up reporting tools, help desk features and top-notch security.
What’s new?	Version 8.7 can perform vulnerability assessment and remediation on systems running Red Hat and SUSE Linux and allows control of USB and wireless connections, among other new capabilities.
Buyer’s Guides	Check out our client and desktop management listings.
DISCUSS	Tell us what client management software you think is best.

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Product category	NETWORK DIAGNOSTICS
Score	4.3 out of 5 (get the test results)
Lab Alliance tester		Barry Nance, independent consultant
Best of the Tests distinction	Of all the network analysis and optimization tools tested last year, tester Barry Nance raved the most about GigaStor, a traffic collection and analysis engine combined with mega-storage hardware. The combination is pricey (the 4TB package we tested costs $35,000), but provides an impressive set of network monitoring, data collection, data mining and reporting features, Nance says.
What’s new?	GigaStor now supports as much as 12TB of data, and a new GigaStor appliance offers the capability of writing network activity data directly to a storage-area network.
Buyer’s Guides	Check out our listing of network traffic analysis tools.
DISCUSS	Tell us about your favorite network analyzer.

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Product category	VOIP ANALYSIS TOOLS
Score	4.3 out of 5 (get the test results)
Lab Alliance tester	Miercom
Best of the Tests distinction	For the second year in a row, the ClearSight Analyzer rates tops among tools that help IT folks peer into VoIP traffic and manage that flow accordingly. In particular, Miercom engineers call out its exceptional diagnostic capabilities and advanced data navigation and display features. Additionally, ClearSight Analyzer recognizes a large variety of the audio and video codecs, and can assess mean opinion scores through simulated and actual traffic.
What’s new?	ClearSight Analyzer 6.0, released last month, (January) offers improved reporting, support for specific VoIP applications such as MSN and Skype, and beefed-up support for IPTV streams.
Buyer’s Guides	Check out our listing of VoIP analysis and management tools.
DISCUSS	Tell us what VoIP analysis tool works best for you.

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Product category	BACKUP AND RECOVERY
Score	4.25 out of 5 (get the test results)
Lab Alliance tester		Tom Henderson, principal researcher, ExtremeLabs
Best of the Tests distinction	BackUp Exec is the bread-and-butter product on the 2007 Best of the Tests roster. While the category itself is not glitzy, all network data needs backup. “Backup Exec pays a great deal of attention to detailing the type of data to be backed up (files, directories, partitions, snapshots, entire systems), and this effort pays administrators and users back by giving them extremely flexible restoration options,” tester Tom Henderson says.
What’s new?	Symantec last month released an enterprise backup reporting tool, called Backup Reporter that works with its Veritas NetBackup and BackUp Exec products to help verify backup service-level compliance.
Buyer’s Guides	Check out our listing of backup and recovery tools.
DISCUSS	Tell us about your favorite tool for data backups.

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Product category	VoIP SECURITY
Score	4.2 out of 5 (get the test results)
Lab Alliance tester	Miercom
Best of the Tests distinction	In our inaugural test of session border controllers, the NexTone MSC and iVMS combination rated tops for its dynamic VoIP session control, real-time monitoring with active error and threshold-limit notification, call-level reporting and integrated firewall features.
What’s new?	The MSC is now called the MSX, or Multiprotocol Session Exchange.
Buyer’s Guides	Check out our listings for VoIP security products.
DISCUSS	Tell us what VoIP security products you think are best.

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Product category	UNIFIED THREAT MANAGEMENT
Score	4.1 out of 5 (get the test results)
Lab Alliance tester		Joel Snyder, senior partner, Opus One
Best of the Tests distinction	The SSG 520 offers impressive speed, at a relatively low cost, with a software package that more than adequately supports the unified security and routing needs of enterprise branch offices. We tested the firewall (based on Juniper’s trusted ScreenOS operating system) and routing services, but the box also can support intrusion prevention, Web filtering, antivirus and antispam capabilities.
What’s new?	ScreenOS now supports captive portals and policy-based routing capabilities.
Buyer’s Guides	Check out our listing of unified threat management products.
DISCUSS	Tell us what unified threat manager ranks tops in your network.

Network Security

by Christine Burns

Director, Network World Test Alliance

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