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	Issue TOC Print full article Print this page Download as PDF E-Mail this URL Flame the author     In this article Introduction SolarWinds.Net SolarWinds Engineers Edition More Products Reviewed Executive Summary How We Tested Report Card

Our labs and the host network at Syracuse University gave us more than enough devices and traffic to get a good feeling of how the products functioned. We installed all the packages on desktop or laptop Pentium III machines, each with 256 MB of RAM.

We limited ourselves to running the most basic versions of these applications to minimize their price. We felt that high prices and complex architectures would make it less likely the products would be used for quick diagnostics and tactical deployments. We know that in many cases these products are deployed as strategic solutions with a fair amount of success, but we didn't want to consider larger concerns such as redundancy, implementation and data access.

For comparison categories, we looked at FCAPS (fault, configuration, accounting, performance, security), with a substitution of inventory for accounting and with the addition of price. An inventory of the network is obviously part of an accounting system, but we didn't feel as though these tools were really trying to solve that larger problem. Instead, they can provide an inventory of what's on the network, vital when trying to diagnose problems like duplicate addresses.