It's no fun when you go to a party and no one knows who you are. Thankfully, modern technology has come up with those "Hello! My name is..." labels. Computers also need some sort of name tag if they're to mingle; luckily, IP address management products step in to tell the computers what their names are. Sure, they're a bit more like directions sheets holding many different items, including default routes and DNS servers--and they're less sticky--but the concept is the same.
A clear winner emerged from our tests of this year's crop of IP address management solutions: Nortel Networks NetID 4.1 outpaced the field with the most features, a well-designed interface and a competitive price. Following it across the finish line were Check Point Software Technologies MetaIP 4.1, Network TeleSystems Shadow IP Management System, Lucent Technologies QIP Enterprise Edition 5.0 and Join Systems Join 4.1.2.
Cisco Systems and Process Software declined to participate in our tests because their products were in between revisions (see "Know the No-Shows," page 92).
IP address management tools set out to automate everything that's involved with the assigning and maintenance of IP networks and hosts. The products use dynamic DHCP, which enables client machines to ask for their own host names automatically, and thus reduces the network administrator's workload.
The IP address management market is branching out into new areas. The biggest competitors to the products we tested are "free" solutions--including Microsoft Corp.'s DHCP server, and BIND and other DHCP servers that are available for no charge. The market is beginning to show dramatic growth with the arrival of high-bandwidth customers. As DSL (digital subscriber line) and cable modems gain popularity, they create a need to manage large numbers of IP addresses.
This year's contenders are more down-to-earth than last year's offerings (see "Range of Management Tools Make IP Addressing Easy," www.networkcomputing.com/918/918r1.html), with products such as NetID relying completely on a Java applet for server management. In addition, we found a clear distinction in administration and price between the two products that rely on SQL back ends--NetID and QIP--and the others, all of which use a noncentralized database (see "To SQL or Not To SQL?" page 94).
We tested the products in our Real-World Labs® at the University of Wisconsin. We installed each on either a Windows NT Pentium Pro 200 with 128 MB of RAM, or Sun UltraSPARC 10 Solaris 2.6 machine. Our test bed included Windows NT and 95 clients.
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