Network Computingwww.networkcomputing.com

Nortel Networks NetID 4.1
First and foremost among the reasons Nortel Networks NetID 4.1 earned our Editor's Choice award was a neat balancing act: It supports more features than the other products we tested, yet it still manages to be competitively priced. Our tests showed that NetID has nearly all the features we could ask for. It also sports a first-rate interface that's both well-designed and easy to use. The GUI is fully Java-applet-based, so we were able to run it from either Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. And it showed surprising speed and agility for a Java applet.

NetID, MetaIP and QIP Enterprise all provide context-dependent pop-up menus (which you can access from the right mouse button while passing over different parts of the screen), but NetID's offers the most options. Context-dependent pop-up menus are very handy because they list only the options that affect the selected portion of the GUI. In our tests, they let us quickly reach the commands we needed. NetID's pop-up menus also include a history option, which provides an easy link to auditing information on any object we were looking at, from hosts to networks.

We also liked the fact that the system automatically attempts to get an ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) echo (also known as a ping) from the host. While other products offer this capability, not all make it so readily accessible. (QIP Enterprise can provide an ICMP echo if the option is turned on, but the product defaults to off.) Using this option, NetID warned us that a device on our network had an improper IP address.

Configurable security levels is another area in which NetID, MetaIP and QIP Enterprise excel. While Network TeleSystems' Shadow IP goes down only to each DHCP server, these three products allow almost anything to have customizable security parameters. We could handle everything, all the way down to the host level, with arbitrary access controls. With the exception of Join, all the products we tested provided some level of customizable access control, but none provide as much as NetID.

NetID fell short in only two areas: It lacks NetBIOS (WINS) services and a publicly available application programming interface (API).

Even with all its well-executed features, NetID remains competitively priced, though its starting price of $18,000 for 5,000 nodes is considerably more than Join's low price. If your company already licenses a SQL server database, though, you may pay less. Regardless, NetID clearly offers the most features for a reasonable cost.

NetID, starts at $4,000 for 2,500 IP addresses, Nortel Networks, (800) 4-NORTEL, (613) 798-4900; fax (613) 722-1997. www.nortelnetworks.com