Committed to reviews

In a world beset by evil, it’s oddly comforting to remember that plain old stupidity still accounts for a sizable share of the bad things that happen.

That’s certainly true in IT. For example, your network is protected by a firewall, a virus shield, and an intrusion detection system. But those mainly stop would-be wrongdoers. They offer no help when, as is often the case, someone within the company — even within IT — foolishly changes a critical setting or deletes the wrong file and brings the system to its knees.

That’s why it’s nice to see the InfoWorld Test Center this week analyzing products that help detect both evil and stupidity on your network.

The review, by Wayne Rash, considers change-detection products — software that watches for additions, deletions, or alterations to files across the system. Actions that are clearly harmful can be automatically reversed; those that are dubious can be flagged for human review (Rash liked the Tripwire product best; for details, see “Lock down your servers”).

This article is typical of the Test Center’s mission — which is to serve the people whose job is to give thumbs up, or thumbs down, to new products and technologies for their companies.

Each week, our analysts evaluate six to 10 new products, exposing their strengths and weaknesses in detail and summarizing the findings in a Bottom Line box that shows the product’s overall score, price, platforms, reviewer’s comments, and so forth.

In case you missed an issue, we recap key data from recent reviews in the Leaderboard section. There are too many reviews to list them all each week, so this week you’ll find security and storage products; next week, it will be wireless, app dev, and integration.

Moreover, the above only covers what the Test Center does normally. Every few weeks, the analysts stretch their legs on a more ambitious project — such as this week’s head-to-head comparison of midsize SANs.

Storage expert Mario Apicella, a half dozen vendor engineers, and the experts at the University of Hawaii’s Advanced Networking Computing Lab needed forklifts to load in systems from EMC, HP, and IBM for testing. You’ll find their detailed report in “EMC, IBM, and HP engage in SAN-to-SAN combat” and a follow-up study of storage-management software in a future issue.

We’re grateful to InfoWorld’s CTO Advisory Council, which helps us plan what to test and how to test it. But we’d also be happy to hear suggestions from you. You can write to me, or directly to the test-planning crew: CTO Chad Dickerson (chad_dickerson@infoworld.com), Test Center Senior Section Editor Doug Dineley (doug_dineley@infoworld.com), and Senior Analyst Wayne Rash (wayne_rash@infoworld.com). That’s part of our commitment, too.