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Network Device Configuration Management Products: Page 4 of 27

But our Editor's Choice goes to Opsware's NA Systems for its excellent production control, configuration management, reporting, ease of use and architecture. It was awash in unique features as well, and we don't mean just its compliance angle; for example, its device-reservation capability let us create multistep tasks that prevented other update jobs from running against targeted devices. That meant other jobs wouldn't try to update the same devices. This may not avert much heartburn in smaller shops, where most of the work gets done by a few network engineers, but it's easy to see how such coordination would eliminate head-scratching in large and decentralized networks.

We think Network Automation System is the best network-configuration product we tested. Its feature set, though strong overall, really excelled in production control, reporting, ease of use and architecture.

Like its rivals, NA System let us use tasks to accomplish our configuration- and device-management goals, including deploying passwords, building backup configurations, updating device OSs, running diagnostics and issuing CLI commands. One task unique to NA System is the automatic synchronization of running and start-up configurations. All we had to do was point to a device or group of devices and run the task.

Tasks can be scheduled or run interactively. Scheduling recurring tasks is a breeze--we could set schedules weekly by day, for a specified number of iterations, and on a particular day of the month. The only options we didn't see were end of month, end of quarter and end of year. Also unique to NA System is a calendaring feature that let us view all the jobs we scheduled on any day. Call us demanding, but we want views by week, month and quarter as well. These batch features mean you won't have to come in at O'dark-hundred to make updates--instead of getting time and a half, you'll be investing in more beauty sleep.