Silver: Catbird V-Agent
Catbird Networks
www.catbird.com
Why it won: Security for mixed physical
and virtual assets is becoming a top
priority for IT pros, and Catbird V-Agent is one of the best solutions available. It
also helps handle complex compliance
and auditing requirements for virtual
machines.
Bronze: OmniAccess 3500 Nonstop
Laptop Guardian
Alcatel-Lucent
www.alcatel.com
Why it won: As the workforce becomes
ever more mobile, managing and securing
laptops can be—and often is—a fulltime
job. The Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess
3500 Nonstop Laptop Guardian gives
you the tools you need to track and manage
mobile assets with ease.
Storage Winners
Gold: RamSan-500
Texas Memory Systems
www.superssd.com
Why it won: The RamSan-500 makes the
jump into solid-state-disk technology,
providing the most storage capacity for
the best price.
In the past, storage has focused
on DAS, NAS, and SANs (including
iSCSI SANs). But the latest
advancement in storage technology,
solid state disk (SSD), provides
many advantages over those
options. Because no rotation is involved,
there are no moving parts and data access
is faster—SSD access times range from 10 to
15 microseconds, which is 250 times as fast
as hard disk drives. The lack of moving parts
also means increased reliability, and SSDs
use less power than other storage options.
Texas Memory Systems’ RamSan-500 provides
all these advantages and is one of the
best SSDs on the market today.
The RamSan-500 provides up to 2TB
of storage, with as many as 100,000 I/O
operations per second (IOPS) sustained
random reads, 10,000 IOPS sustained random
writes, and 2GBps of sustained random
read/write bandwidth. Texas Memory
Systems notes that “compared to a similar
capacity high-end hard disk–based RAID
system, the RamSan-500 can deliver in
excess of 16 times the performance while
using 50 percent less power.” In addition,
the RamSan-500 costs less than competing
products; you get all these bells and whistles
for a price similar to enterprise RAID
storage. Windows IT Pro Technical Director
Michael Otey prefers the RamSan-500 to BiTMICRO’s similar product because of the
RamSan’s price and capacity.
—Lavon Peters
See associated figure
Silver: Dell EqualLogic PS5000E
Dell EqualLogic
www.dell.com/equallogic
Why it won: The Dell EqualLogic PS5000E
iSCSI array provides cost-effective capacity,
scalability, and optimal performance
for common business applications.
Bronze: E-Disk Altima ATA-133
BiTMICRO
www.bitmicro.com
Why it won: The E-Disk Altima ATA-133 provides huge storage capacities in a
standard disk drive form factor.
SharePoint Winners
Gold: File Migrator for SharePoint
Quest Software
www.quest.com
Why it won: As companies flock to Microsoft’s
SharePoint collaboration platform,
they face having to move massive quantities
of information from their file share infrastructure
into SharePoint. File Migrator
for SharePoint provides the best solution
to that problem.
Businesses have long used
file shares to store important
company information, but in
today’s highly collaborative business
environments, information
workers increasingly need functionality
that file shares don’t provide, such
as version history, content approval, workflow,
offline access, and content management.
Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration
platform provides a robust solution for
these companies, but they still face a major
stumbling block: the complexity of moving
all that data into a SharePoint environment.
SharePoint provides no help for doing that
job. But Quest Software’s File Migrator for
SharePoint does.
Doug Davis, director of product management
for Quest, says people are definitely
buying into the concept of SharePoint as
the “next-generation file share.” With File Migrator for SharePoint, companies
don’t have to blindly move content
into a SharePoint repository.
“File Migrator lets you schedule
and execute bulk file migrations,
cleanse and filter data as you move
it, and structure the data to fit your
needs,” Davis said. “You can add
metadata on top of it to classify and
categorize it. This categorization and
classification of data is one of the crucial
components of why people want to
move to SharePoint. Having that in an
automated migration tool is extremely
valuable.” We agree, and File Migrator
for SharePoint gets our Editors’ Best
award for the top SharePoint product.
—Gayle Rodcay
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