The year in hardware belonged to Sun, whose Opteron-based Sun Fire servers surged ahead of the competition. Stratus’ fault-tolerant Windows server earned top marks and Dell’s ninth-generation PowerEdge made a good showing, whereas the Egenera BladeFrame EX proved to be an odd mixture of exceptional hits and minor misses.

In systems management, Kace packed enterprise-class Windows management into an SMB package, and PremiTech brought the too-often-ignored client-side perspective to performance monitoring of enterprise apps. Splunk brought Web-style search to log mining, and LogLogic continued to build on a heavy duty log management and analysis platform.  

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