What's Hot

Ensure Problem-Free Web Transactions
Brendan Hogan, Roanoke, Virginia
RealiTea, TeaLeaf Technology
www.tealeaf.com
415-495-8000

Brendan Hogan of Roanoke, Virginia, provides high praise for TeaLeaf Technology's RealiTea, a solution that provides immediate information about problems on your Web site that block users from completing transactions. Hogan says, "We use RealiTea to capture and archive every user's Web session to our various systems. By capturing and archiving user sessions, we can proactively watch for session errors and correct them. We can also identify user errors in a session reported as being problematic. RealiTea is an incredible tool for any company managing a high-availability Web site. You receive real-time session information that no other tool can give."

RealiTea captures a record of what every user to your site sees and does in real time. From the captured data, the software generates a complete visual replay of every user session. The application can alert you to problems (e.g., blank pages, missing confirmation numbers, embedded exceptions) that you can then detect by inspecting the page that was delivered to the user. The software can also identify how many users and which users are affected by problems. RealiTea can correlate problem, user actions, and application behavior within and across sessions and diagnostic sources. You can transport the captured data to RealiTea Server, a scalable, distributed, real-time platform that monitors, aggregates, correlates, and archives data that RealiTea captures and records. You can encrypt data that you stream to the RealiTea Server. RealiTea is priced based on the number of user seats and the number of CPUs in the Web servers that the product monitors. Pricing starts at approximately $75,000 for a typical configuration.

Easily Deploy and Migrate Solutions
Douglas Davis, Mosinee, Wisconsin
Altiris Deployment Solution, Altiris
www.altiris.com
801-226-8500, 888-252-5551

Douglas Davis of Mosinee, Wisconsin, nominated Altiris Deployment Solution as a product that makes his job much easier. He says, "I work as a network administrator and computer support technologist for a midsized school district. Recently, by using Deployment Solution, I installed a new application in a lab full of computers in 10 minutes. Typically, deploying new software or updates requires a week or more and involves me working around class schedules and installing one computer at a time. During the summer of 2002, I had to set up 50 new machines with Windows XP and Symantec's Norton Ghost. I had all summer to get the job done and just finished by the time school started. In the summer of 2003, I had to set up 120 machines and with Deployment Solution finished in 2 weeks! The machines were ready to use with individual profiles for all the users. I'm very happy with Deployment Solution!"

Deployment Solution is a tool for desktops, servers, notebooks, and handheld devices that provides OS deployment, configuration, computer personality migrations, and software deployment. You don't have to leave your desk to manage your systems because you can use Deployment Solution's wizards to build events to perform common computer management tasks. You can select an event on a single computer or a group of computers, then immediately run the event. You can also schedule the event to run at a time you specify. For pricing, contact Altiris.

Use a SAN to Allocate, Recover, Scale, and Automate
David Payne, Bloomington, Minnesota
Storage Center, Compellent
www.compellent.com
952-294-3300, info@compellent.com

David Payne of Bloomington, Minnesota, says that Compellent's Storage Center is one of the hottest products he's come across in the storage industry in a long time. He says, "We've been using Storage Center in our office for the last four months. As experienced storage users and consultants, we've been exposed to most of the leading Storage Area Network (SAN) products on the market. Compellent has created a new system that's so easy to use, even our salespeople can allocate storage from the Web-based GUI interface. We have Storage Center running with VMware systems and Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000, Linux, and Novell servers. We have less than 1TB of physical disk space in our Storage Center but have allocated more than 10TB of space to our servers. As we come close to filling up the physical disk, Storage Center warns us to add more disk space. The solution predicts that, based on current trends, we'll need more disk space 5 months from now. The price point is aimed at the small to midsized market, rather than the bloated pricing of other enterprise systems."

Storage Center is a scalable, open-systems hardware modular SAN platform that lets businesses mix and match any number of drives, controllers, and enclosures. The solution also provides a suite of software applications that features automatic replication and data-recovery capability. For pricing, contact Compellent.

Identify and Repair Misconfigurations in Your Enterprise
John Garrett, Monroe, Michigan
Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM), Configuresoft
www.configuresoft.com
719-447-4600

Configuresoft's Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) is software that gathers configuration data elements from every machine in your enterprise and places it into a central repository. The software consolidates and organizes the data into useful information so that you can identify and correct misconfigurations before they result in security breaches or downtime. ECM can alert you to new security bulletins; create, delete, and modify registry keys or values; deploy hotfixes and patches; modify event-log settings; reboot machines; run remote commands; and start, stop, and modify services. The program features the ability to dynamically compare registry settings between machines. Pricing is $995 per server and $30 per workstation.

John Garrett of Monroe, Michigan, applauds ECM. He says, "If you really want a cool product, check out ECM. It has been a complete time-saver! We have evaluated and are in the process of purchasing this product for our division, which consists of more than 1500 workstations and 135 servers. ECM comes in really handy when you have systems that must mirror one another (e.g., Web farm, application servers). We can set up a gold standard and force any system to look exactly like that standard. The product is very impressive and is a breeze to install."

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