It's the hump day of a very short week for many people, but that doesn't mean a lack of useful stories. In the Test Center, there are reviews of appliances for dealing with unbalanced network loads and unwieldy network rules, and an Open Source Blog entry on possible limits to the open source model. A Network in Balance: When you're network is large, busy, and critical to your business, it can make sense to bala It’s the hump day of a very short week for many people, but that doesn’t mean a lack of useful stories. In the Test Center, there are reviews of appliances for dealing with unbalanced network loads and unwieldy network rules, and an Open Source Blog entry on possible limits to the open source model. A Network in Balance: When you’re network is large, busy, and critical to your business, it can make sense to balance the overall load across the available network segments. Logan Harbaugh looks at Coyote Point’s load balancer and finds an appliance that dispenses with frills in favor of solid performance on its designed task. Business Rules that Work: It’s hard enough trying to figure out what your business processes really are; making sure that your I.T. rules actually implement the rules can be a nightmare. Steven Nunez’s review of Blaze Advisor 6.5 finds a system that it powerful and complete, though the power comes at a price. The latest version of the Fair Isaac tool isn’t simple or easy to use, so it’s not a system to be taken up lightly. If your enterprise needs to be sure that the rules fit the process, though, it can be a life-saver. JBoss Leads: The open-source software model has many strengths. Making it easy for a company to thrive in a business built on open-source software really isn’t one of them. In a blog post with serious real-world implications, Savio Rodrigues looks at JBoss and finds a company that’s had no trouble generating sales leads, but some difficulty converting those leads into paying customers. Why do you care? In the business world, IT products require support, and a company that can’t build revenue streams has trouble keeping support staff employed. This isn’t an indictment of the open-source system, but it is a serious look at a very real issue for this vitally important branch of the software industry. Technology Industry