Features

Hot MoMs By Bruce Boardman Today's managers of managers oversee your network, applications and systems as well as find the root cause of problems that could lead to serious service delays. They might cost you big bucks, but the payoff could be huge.

Review: A MoM With Smarts By Bruce Boardman We tested five BMC knowledge-module-compatible MoMs. Smarts InCharge Solutions Suite outwitted the others and won our Editor's Choice award.

Workshops

Workshop: 10 Gig Can't Wait to Interoperate By Peter Morrissey Those with deep pockets, lots of fiber and a need for speed will be happy to know that 802.3ae is officially a standard. Should you wait any longer?

Buyer's Guide: Networking in the Palm of Your Hand By Sean Ginevan As PDAs move beyond the personal space and into the enterprise, you need a firm grip on the options available for your users.

Online Only: Interactive Buyer's Guide: PDAs We line up the PDAs most likely to be on your list of products to research and provide an easy way to study and compare the features of each, including processor speed, internal and external memory, screen size and resolution, available multimedia features and more.

Sneak Previews

FortiGate Fortifies Your Traffic Security By Michael J. DeMaria Despite its need for a management interface makeover, the FortiGate 500's ability to manage, inspect and route traffic between multiple subnets had us clamoring at the gate.

Rainbow's NetSwift iGate Closes the Door on Internet Bad Guys By Lori MacVittie This token-based authentication product provides SSL acceleration and access control; a small, per user USB key to store the token; and a slick Java-based management tool.

Improvements Tighten Lucent's Security Management Server 7.0 By Mike Fratto LSMS 7.0 overflows with new features -- QoS support, DHCP Relay and Brick DHCP client support, HTTP app filtering and more -- to put the squeeze on potential security holes in your network.

Departments

Letters "Wake me up when the war is over -- if there is anything left of the Linux dream then." -- Charles W. Flink, AT&T Labs (retired)

Quick Takes We take a look at these top products: SpiderSoftware SpiderBox content-caching software Covalent Enterprises Enterprise Ready Server Benchmark Storage Innovations ValuSmart 160 tape drive

Columns

The Inside Story: Your MoM is so Phat! By James Hutchinson Our in-depth look at pricing makes readers think about the time and work involved in rolling out a solution.

BuzzCut: Oracle's Groupware Challenge By Lori MacVittie IBM's Lotus unit and Microsoft have owned the groupware space. But kinks are beginning to show in their respective armor.

BuzzCut: It's Not Intel's Fault By Steven J. Schuchart Jr. Expect the same lukewarm reaction to Intel's new Itanium 2 processor as its predecessor received.

Full Nelson: Just When You Thought It Was Safe By Fritz Nelson "The names may change, but my song remains the same: I am still taken with company and product names even though my audience might now be a handful of marketing people and not the five people who used to read my column."

Top of the Stack: The Next Revolution in VPNs By David Willis Frame relay can do most of the things that the new network-based VPNs can do. So the big selling point of NB-VPNs is the reduced pricing structure.

BuzzCut: SAP DB: The Other Open-Source Database? By Don MacVittie SAP DB 7.2, quietly introduced and donated to the open-source movement, is a cut above its competitors. True, SAP itself will benefit from this offering, but so will the open-source community.

BuzzCut: Rendezvous on the LAN Side By Michael J. DeMaria Apple's new auto-IP-services discovery protocol, Rendezvous, will make maintaining a network much easier by reducing administrative overhead and lowering user training/notifications.