F E A T U R E
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Enterprise Management System
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Winner
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HP OpenView Network Node Manager, Hewlett-Packard Co., (877) 686-9637, (800) 637-7740
www.openview.hp.com/products/nnm
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Finalists
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Tivoli Enterprise, Tivoli Systems, (800) 2TIVOLI, (512) 436-8000
www.tivoli.com
Veritas NerveCenter 3.6, Veritas Software Corp., (800) 327-2232, (407) 531-7500
www.veritas.com
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Award: Enterprise Management System
Hewlett-Packard Co. looked at the network management train wreck and saw that users haven't been asking for whole new platforms--what they need are solutions. So, to deliver a truly useful system, HP bundled its successful network and systems management products, such as OpenView Network Node Manager, NetMetrix and IT/Operations, into suites under the new nameplate VantagePoint. Wrapping it in a Java GUI and providing good reporting, HP delivers network management that solves problems right out of the box.
The OpenView suite of management products has long been first in the network and systems management market, primarily because of Network Node Manager. NNM was the first enterprise network management platform, the most imitated, the most installed, and the most often found as shelfware. It was this last problem--a majority of shops having NNM installed, but not using it--that foreshadowed doom. VantagePoint is more than just a repackaging--it's a precursor of what's to come. With its focus on service rather than just products, NNM is first again.
One of OpenView's longtime advantages has been the wide support of third-party vendors, which use OpenView to launch their own management applications. With Smart Plug-ins, this support continues. Smart Plug-ins are ready-to-go solutions that extend HP's reach to the e-commerce world by allowing VantagePoint to manage database, ERP, middleware and messaging applications.
-- Bruce Boardman
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Network Performance Management System
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Winner
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NextPoint S3, NextPoint Networks, (978) 392-2026
www.nextpoint.com
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Finalists
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Network Health (now shipping as eHealth), Concord Communications, (800) 851-8725, (508) 460-4646
www.concord.com
VitalSuite, Lucent Technologies, (888) 767-2988, (650) 318-1100
www.vitalsuite.com
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Award: Network Performance Management System
SNMP has been around forever to collect useful network performance information. The tiny agents are on every new piece of network gear, and are fairly interoperable. So what's the big deal? Until recently, gathering and making sense of all that information has largely been left undone.
The product that gets our nod as the best at collecting, storing, massaging and, most important, making sense of all the SNMP data floating around is NextPoint Networks' NextPoint S3. In our tests, it worked its magic on a large network for many months, proving to be reliable and providing just the right mix of data from many diverse systems (see "Network Management That Works" at www.networkcomputing.com/1102/1102f1.html).
Looking at lots of data--even filtered through a management system--can be overwhelming to the point of being useless. But NextPoint S3 presents data in manageable chunks, by offering overviews and selected looks based on user and group membership.
-- Bruce Boardman
Award: Software Delivery Solution
Moving software--or, for that matter, any files--isn't high on anyone's "Things to look forward to" list. But it's still a task that has to be done--and done, and done. This calls for an automated procedure that not only includes scheduling, but can also be cognizant of the amount of bandwidth needed when shipping large files.
Microsoft Corp.'s Systems Management Server 2.0 proved to be the best for this task, with excellent control over the amount of bandwidth used in shipping files over WAN links. SMS also has superb fan-out function, thanks to its architecture of hierarchical primary and secondary servers, which offer management of multiple stores of data to support geographically distributed enterprises.
-- Bruce Boardman
Award: Application Monitoring System
No one really cares about the network, the server, or even the desktop operating system. What people are really concerned with are transactions, messages and files. Of course, we all know that servers, routers, switches and desktop systems connect users, clients, customers and partners, but the beginning and end of all these transactions is an application.
Applications cut a wide swath, from the most common FTP, DNS and SMTP types to complex and uniquely deployed ERP and e-commerce programs. Further complicating this mix are Web servers, applet servers, load balancers, gateways and database servers. The products that call themselves application monitoring tools range from relatively simple port monitors to those watching the transactions of multitiered e-commerce programs.
The package that won us over in this category is Lucent Technologies' VitalSuite (see "App Monitoring Grows Up" at www.networkcomputing.com/1016/1016f12.html). VitalSuite's application and network monitoring tools gave us an overall look at network and application traffic, with its easily deployed agent passively monitoring desktop traffic and reporting it back to a centralized database. Lucent's product did the best job of gathering and analyzing the end user's actual experience with deployed applications.
-- Bruce Boardman
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Remote Control
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Winner
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pcAnywhere, Symantec Corp., (800) 441-7234, (408) 253-9600
www.symantec.com
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Finalists
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NetOp Remote Control, CrossTec Corp., (800) 675-0729, (561) 391-6560
www.CrossTecCorp.com
ReachOut Enterprise 8.42, Stac Software, (800) 522-7822, (858) 794-4300
www.stac.com
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Award: Remote Control
Symantec Corp.'s pcAnywhere still leads the remote-control pack. It provides a full remote-control feature set, excellent integration into Windows 95/98 and NT Domains, automated remote installation, and decent security.
Offering lots of centralized control, pcAnywhere lets administrators enforce network access policies as well as update pcAnywhere installations. Under Windows NT, pcAnywhere hosts can also be started, stopped and reconfigured remotely. Administrators managing large-scale deployments will especially like the configuration utility for network installation. No more editing installation scripts--using the GUI, administrators can configure installation options. The program is unique in that it can send more than 40 SNMP traps to a central SNMP management console.
Symantec's product does a good job on the security front, too. Users can be added locally, or pcAnywhere can leverage an existing Windows NT Domain for authentication. Inside pcAnywhere, privileges to remote control and disk drives can be assigned to individual users. Communications can be encrypted using three levels of security, and the host can optionally deny access to a security level lower than its own.
Remote control is slower than direct access, but pcAnywhere offers a number of options to boost its speed: The program caches objects locally, then refreshes the screen using deltas and the local cache when possible. Color depth can also be controlled, to reduce the amount of data transferred.
-- Bruce Boardman
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Policy-Based Network Management Solution
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Winner
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Orchestream Enterprise Edition 2.0, Orchestream, (212) 629-3134
www.orchestream.com
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Finalists
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Cisco QoS Policy Manager 1.1, Cisco Systems, (800) 553-6387, (408) 526-4000
www.cisco.com
Open Policy System 1.0, IPHighway, (508) 620-1141
www.IPHighway.com
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Award: Policy-Based Network Management Solution
Policy-based network management has yet to become a full-scale enterprise solution. But even now, products in this category lend a hand in configuring many aspects of the network that were previously left entirely to the command line, such as Quality of Service, VPNs, and user-to-QoS mappings. In this space, companies are clamoring for attention, hawking both single- and multivendor solutions. We've chosen Orchestream's multivendor vendor approach for our Well-Connected Award because it was the most mature product we tested in our review of policy-based management solutions (see "Policy-Based Network Management" at www.networkcomputing.com/1024/1024f1.html).
Orchestream Enterprise Edition, which provides policy-based management for a network that comprises many vendors' products, takes a tremendous step in the right direction in terms of provisioning the network for better response times. The package has a very strong multivendor platform that does wonders in an environment with many different brands of hardware. It also features integrated network-topology discovery, which reduces the time needed for configuration. Once Orchestream Enterprise Edition discovers devices on a network, it's easy to define a topology by dragging those devices into a policy domain.
-- Bruce Boardman
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IP Address Management System
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Winner
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Optivity NetID, Nortel Networks, (800) 4-NORTEL, (506) 674-5471
www.nortelnetworks.com
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Finalists
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Meta lP, Check Point Software Technologies, (800) 429-4391, (650) 628-2000
www.checkpoint.com
Shadow IPserver, Network TeleSystems, (800) 990-4776, (408) 523-8100
www.nts.com
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Award: IP Address Management System
Chasing a duplicate IP address, or simply tracking the adds, changes and deletions in a large dynamic network, can burn tremendous amounts of administration time. IP address management tools make the task much easier, completely automating the assignment, reservation and revocation of IP addressing. They also do this without error, a claim even the most careful of us can't make.
Feature-rich and competitively priced, Nortel Networks Corp.'s NetID is hard not to like (see "The Name of the Game: IP Addressing" at www.networkcomputing.com/1017/1017f32.html). It provides useful, detailed, context-sensitive help; validates correct address settings on clients; and has the most granular access controls of everything we tested in this field. NetID's first-rate Java applet-based GUI is friendly and runs equally well on Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. The GUI makes it easy to reach necessary commands, and provides the widest range of options compared with other products in this category. We were also impressed with this program's overall speed and agility. With its superb feature set and user-friendliness, NetID is a winner worth paying for.
-- Bruce Boardman
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Best Mobile Computing Technology
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Winner
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Palm OS Platform, Palm, (800) 881-7256, (408) 326-9000
www.palm.com
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Finalists
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AvantGo Enterprise 3.1, AvantGo, (650) 638-3399
www.avantgo.com
Ricochet, Metricom, (800) GO WIRELESS, (408) 399-8200
www.ricochet.net
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Award: Best Mobile Computing Technology
One vendor is most responsible for the explosion of interest in palm-format devices: Palm, with its Palm OS platform. Starting with the premise that it was better to do a few things well than to do everything poorly, Palm OS devices have adhered beautifully to the "Keep it simple" philosophy. As a result, Palm OS devices have snappy performance, excellent battery life and a small size—all of which have made them enormously useful to a large and growing body of users. This year, the release of the Palm Vx, IIIxe and color IIIc continued to indicate the company’s ability to innovate in the area of size and features without sacrificing usability and battery life. Palm’s licensing of the platform to other vendors, which have created their own well-designed devices, such as the expandable Visor and TRGpro, is further evidence of a coherent and viable corporate vision. An astonishing array of excellent products and services were available for mobile users this year, but none has changed the face of portable computing as much as the Palm OS platform.
-- Richard Hoffman
Award: Midrange SNMP Software
Many network management platforms have taken the "simple" out of SNMP. You can put in years of labor to get them working, and they just don't seem to be worth the effort. But smaller, simpler SNMP network management applications do exist, and they deliver excellent out-of-the-box functionality.
The simplicity of Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold impressed us the most. The product provides a simple, straightforward interface for monitoring servers as well as network devices. Part of the reason the software remains easy and useful, after having been around for many years, is that it doesn't pretend to have some strategic enterprise purpose. We like that.
Beyond basic SNMP MIB-II tracking, WhatsUp Gold tracks the availability of common TCP and UDP ports, such as telnet, FTP, POP and IMAP, keeping tabs on common network applications. In addition to IP, the software tracks IPX devices.
-- Bruce Boardman
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