Some people are born with the gift of gab: They know just how to address the masses. If only the ability to address masses of workstations and other IP-based nodes came so naturally. Luckily, IP address management products pick up the slack, not only giving you the means to address your machines, but providing a way to compile all network information in one place.

To view the Report card.
We put six enterprise-level IP address management products to the test at Network Computing's University of Wisconsin real-world lab. To our surprise, the tests showed that each product excels in one area, which flattened the overall scores dramatically. For instance, Quadritek Systems' QIP 4.0's offers top-of-the-line scalability, while MetaInfo's Meta IP 4.0 offers the most features. (To see how each product would rate for your most important IP management tasks, see our Interactive Report Card ®, which allows you to read just the weight of the scores, at www.networkcomputing.com/918/918r1report.html.)

Picking up from where last year's IP address management products left off (see "Addressing the Nightmare of TCP/IP Management," at www.networkcomputing.com/816/816r1.html), these new products add various features, including support for DNS and DHCP. Nevertheless, there's still plenty of room for improvement, especially when it comes to performance.

In this round of tests, Network Telesystems' Shadow IPcentral earned our Editor's Choice award: It offers impressive features, including an easy-to-use GUI and a system to service the network that is built from the network up. Quadritek Systems' QIP was a close runner-up, scoring points with its ability to service thousands of nodes. However, it was hampered by a somewhat difficult-to-use interface and an extremely taxing installation process. Third was Bay Networks' NetID, which demonstrated its strength in data liquidity--importing and exporting data to fit seamlessly into your network.

Trailing the frontrunners are three other products we tested: Cisco Systems' Network Registrar, JOIN Systems' JOIN IP Management System and MetaInfo's Meta IP 4.0.

Network Telesystems Shadow IPcentral

Network Telesystems has vastly improved its IP management servers in the past year. The network management core of Shadow IPcentral, combined with the Internet services of IPserver, offers a vital technology mix to manage your IP addresses. The suite offers customized hardware and software that was built by network administrators for network administrators--and the icing on the cake is that it's reasonably priced.

We were most impressed by the suite's focus on redundant services. IPserver offers a number of features you won't find in any of the other DHCP servers we tested, including redundant DNS/Dynamic DNS and DHCP. These redundancy features let your servers work in tandem, so, for example, if one server malfunctions, the remaining servers will instantly cover for it.

In addition, IPserver was the only product we tested that can be installed on its own hardware, which lets you hand off the whole package to whomever is running your enterprise network. All IPserver administration is managed through a standard keyboard and a simple VGA monitor.