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The ease with which the silver shovel slides into the dirt of the groundbreaking ceremony to introduce wide-area dial-up remote access to the corporation belies the real difficulties ahead. Enterprise remote access is all about building the complex structures that house reliable and easy wide-area access into the corporate network. As the number of users rises and the types of required connections multiply, the complexity threatens the system's reliability and ease of use. A network manager can soon become the superintendent of a ramshackle, broken-down hut instead of a gleaming steel-and-glass tower.
To blueprint success when architecting remote access server and client installations, user authentication, WAN access protocol support, proactive and reactive statistics and a maximization of switched WAN analog speed limitations is increasingly more complex as port densities and user counts grow.
None of the products we tested in our Syracuse lab is perfect, but the winner, Novell's NetWare Connect 2, and the honorable mention, Microcom's LANexpress 4000 release 4.0, and the very strong entries of Xylogics' Remote Annex 4000 and Shiva's LanRover/E Plus, all have strong server and user management and excellent speed. NetWare Connect's recently added PPP support, a superior GUI manager that includes true call accounting, and NASI and ARA support, and NDS integration put it on top of the heap. If you're not a IPX shop and want a hardware-based solution, Microcom's LANexpress 4000 and Xylogics' Remote Annex 4000 offer excellent management and speed, with LANexpress leading in client integration and Annex providing high port density.
In the basement is the Multi-Tech RNI08, which is not built for the enterprise. Its lack of a remote GUI management console to virtualize servers, its lack of server-based user authentication and its spotty IP file transfers make it more suited to departmental and remote office solutions. Also at the lower end of the market is Stampede's Remote Office Communications Server. Our testing uncovered a bug in its code that prevented IP transfers. While Stampede offers one of the more advanced servers and one of the best clients, its architecture tends to be better suited for departmental environments.
Novell NetWare Connect 2
If you thought that NetWare Connect was just for Novell-exclusive shops, think again. True, it may not make sense to install...