- Top 5 WAN accelerators
- Top 5 insider information leak prevention protectors
- Top five rack-mount servers
- Top five business rule management systems
- Top five WAN vendor excuses
- Five spam blockers by the numbers
- Friday Five: Firefox extension resources
- Friday Five: Top five security challenges
- Friday Five: Top 5 virtualization challenges
March 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)
If you missed today's chat with Silver Peak Systems CEO Rick Tinsley, you can find a transcript of the discussion here . If you didn't miss it, and you're looking for the links to the reviews I promised, here they are:
Riverbed Steelhead with RiOS 3.0 = Excellent, 9.0
Silver Peak NX Series = Very Good, 8.5
Blue Coat SG Appliance = Very Good, 8.4
Cisco Wide Area Application Engine = Very Good, 8.4
Packeteer iShared = Good, 7.9
The links are listed in order of overall scores received in our reviews (by Doctor WAN himself, Keith Schultz). Now, Keith would be the first to note that your mileage may vary. Every one of these solutions has a sweet spot, so picking the right one will depend on the nature of your WAN link and the kinds of traffic you're running.
But to get down to the nitty gritty, read Keith's reviews. And check out the chat with Rick Tinsley. The Silver Peak CEO was also featured in a two-part interview at NetworkWorld.com this week.
Posted by Doug Dineley on March 30, 2007 02:52 PM
December 08, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Top 5 insider information leak prevention protectors
Call it data loss prevention, insider threat protection, information leak prevention, or whatever you like, a number of vendors have assembled entire suites of products aimed at preventing confidential information from slipping out of the enterprise via e-mail, IM, FTP, Web, and even USB stick.
These solutions have come a long way fast, they continue to evolve quickly, and more seem to arrive every day, but here's how things stand this Friday, December 8, 2006:
1. Vontu 5.0, Excellent [9.1]
2. Reconnex iGuard 2.1, Excellent [8.9]
3. Oakley Networks SureView 3.3, Excellent [8.8] and
3. PortAuthority 5.0, Excellent [8.8]
5. Tablus Content Alarm NW 4, Excellent, [8.7]
As you can see, this is a real horse race. Click the links to read the reviews. And if you come up with a label you think all the vendors should agree on, please let us know.
Posted by Doug Dineley on December 8, 2006 01:15 PM
December 01, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Sun's x86 servers are red hot, and I mean that in a good way. Our list of the top five scorers among the servers reviewed in 2006 includes two from Sun, both from the Opteron-based "Galaxy" series, and they're #1 and #2. HP, Dell, and IBM, watch your backs.
Sun Fire X4600 M2 Excellent [8.9] Sun Fire X4200 Excellent [8.7] Dell PowerEdge 2950 Very Good [8.5] IBM System x3550 Very Good [8.4] HP ProLiant DL380 G4 Very Good [8.2]
Just follow the links to our reviews.
Posted by Doug Dineley on December 1, 2006 12:06 PM
November 03, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Top five business rule management systems
In 2006, InfoWorld (more specifically rules wizard James Owen) evaluated five rule-based systems. Here's how they stack up, based on their overall scores in our reviews:
#1. Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor 6.1 (Excellent, 8.7)
#2. Corticon 4 and ILOG JRules 6.0 (both Very Good, 8.2)
#4. JBoss Rules 3.2 (Good, 7.4)
#5. Jess 7.0 (Good, 7.3)
Follow the links to read the full reviews. Blaze and JRules are the longstanding leaders in the space, boasting the richest sets of features and the most enterprise customers. Corticon is a strong challenger with a different approach, and a very nice spreadsheet GUI for both developers and business users. Jess is the grandaddy of open source BRMS, while JBoss Rules is a newcomer with big momentum.
The bottom line on the space in James Owen's own words:
I like Jess. I like JBoss Rules. But I like ILOG's JRules better and I like Fair Isaac's Blaze Advisor better. I might even like some of the others, like Haley who has the greatest interface in the world today, if they would let me test them out here in my lab and not just take their word for things. If I could pick and choose, it would be Haley's interface, JRules for multiple options, Blaze Advisor / OPSJ for pure speed and natural language, JBoss Rules for pricing (and Mark Proctor) and their emphasis on all things technical via Wiki, and Jess because of Dr. Ernest Friedman-Hill and his worldwide support group.
For all of the rule systems he's able to get his hands on, James keeps a running set of benchmark results. You can follow the race right here.
Posted by Doug Dineley on November 3, 2006 12:35 PM
October 20, 2006 | Comments: (0)
InfoWorld has not published a comparative review of WAN optimization solutions, but it is not because we didn't try. Back in early 2005, just before Juniper's agreement to acquire Peribit kicked off a buying spree in the space, we made plans to round up a bunch of WAN products, expose them to a variety of traffic types and link characteristics, and see how things shaked out. We extended invitations to many vendors, and we discussed test methodology with a few, but in the end only one or maybe two were willing to be measured against competitors. Nearly all were eager to support a stand-alone review. But a comparison? The answer was either "Nope" or "We'll get back to you."
Some of the vendors offered what you might call artful excuses. Here's a list of the jucier ones we heard:
Because most WAN links have no appreciable packet loss, our solution doesn't handle that and we'd prefer you not test us that way
We don't want to be compared to vendor XYZ's CIFS optimization, although we are the best at CIFS optimization
Our focus is on optimizing long, fat pipes, not short skinny pipes, or short fat pipes, or long skinny pipes
We don't want to confuse our customer base by being compared to vendor XYZ
We do WAN optimization, not WAN acceleration (or vice-versa)
Posted by Doug Dineley on October 20, 2006 01:13 PM
October 06, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Five spam blockers by the numbers
We've evaluated five anti-spam solutions this year, and for the third year running Symantec (and secret sauce Brightmail) reigns supreme in accuracy. Here's the ranking by percentage of spam blocked in our tests:
Symantec Mail Security, 97% accurate, 0 critical false positives, .199% non-critical false positives
Proofpoint Protection Server, 95% accurate, 0 critical false positives, .215% non-critical false positives
IronPort C-Series, 93% accurate, 0 critical false positives, .058% non-critical false positives
Mirapoint Message Server, 92% accurate, .46% critical false positives, 4.661% non-critical false positives
Microsoft Antigen Spam Manager, 82% accurate, .358% critical false positives, 2.454% non-critical false positives
Symantec, Proofpoint, and IronPort all proved quite accurate, and all three excelled at avoiding false positives. IronPort deserves special mention here, having registered only 1 false positive in nearly 10,000 messages, and this a "non-critical" one. Non-critical false positives are mass mailings that are incorrectly identified as spam, while critical false positives are personal messages that are incorrectly blocked.
Anti-spam gateways have come a long way since 2003, when we first began testing them. It's hard to find a viable commercial solution today that isn't at least 90% accurate, and the best ones exceed 95%. Microsoft Antigen's 82% accuracy is head-scratchingly behind the curve. Click the links to read the full reviews.
Posted by Doug Dineley on October 6, 2006 05:41 PM
September 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Friday Five: Firefox extension resources
Check out these lists and resources for extensions that will let you do everything from block ads to blog about a page or check the weather.
4. If you have Greasemonkey, go to Userscripts.org for tons of scripts.
5. Find scripts based on the problem you want to solve at eConsultant.com's list
Alas, the Abe Vigoda Watch plugin is no longer available.
Posted by Stephanie McLoughlin on September 29, 2006 04:59 PM
September 22, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Friday Five: Top five security challenges
In August InfoWorld and IDG Research Services Group surveyed 430 InfoWorld subscribers about the top security challenges they face. The threats they deemed most significant:
Employees underestimate the importance of following security policy (52% of respondents)
Increasing sophistication of attacks (51%)
Business executives underestimate the importance of following security policy (44%)
Budget too small to cover necessary security purchases (40%)
Increasing complexity of security solutions (39%) and increasing volume and complexity of network traffic (39%)
Other top concerns included mobile clients and unmanaged devices, wireless devices, an always-on environment, the patchwork nature of network security, and the lack of security experts within the company. Look for the full story in our October 30 issue.
Source: InfoWorld Security Research Report 2006.
Posted by Doug Dineley on September 22, 2006 01:02 PM
September 15, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Friday Five: Top 5 virtualization challenges
In June InfoWorld and IDG Research Services Group surveyed 451 InfoWorld subscribers about their virtualization initiatives. In addition to their plans for server, storage, and application virtualization, respondents were asked about the hurdles they've encountered. The most popular complaints:
Inadequate skills/training issues 46%
Complexity 44%
Software licensing issues 41%
Performance and scalability challenges 38%
Inadequate management tools 32%
Oft-cited challenges also included the difficulty to prove ROI, measure results, and obtain buy-in from upper management and stakeholders.
Source: InfoWorld Virtualization Study.
Posted by Doug Dineley on September 15, 2006 04:02 PM
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