SQL Server Magazine and sister publication Windows 2000 Magazine presented Best of Show awards to six exhibitors at the Microsoft Tech-Ed 2000 Conference in Orlando, Florida, last week. Judges selected two Best-of-Show winners each in the categories of SQL Server, Windows 2000, and Exchange Server. Giganet won a SQL Server Best of Show award for its Clan Host Adapters and Cluster Switches server farm networking technologies, which use SQL Server 2000's Virtual Interface (VI) to give SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition plug-and-play multinode server clusters for scalability, reliability, and performance gains. "We are pleased at this validation of our VI-based technology," says Gareth S. Taube, Giganet vice president of marketing. "We are committed to continue working with industry-leading vendors such as Microsoft to bring the benefits of VI's enhanced performance to the database market." Knosys ProClarity won a Best of Show award in the SQL Server category for providing powerful yet easy-to-manipulate views into SQL Server OLAP Services data. ProClarity harnesses the power of OLAP by using a standard ActiveX component architecture that offers scalability and flexibility. Knosys also provides an extensive Application Developers Kit for creating custom analytical applications. Windows 2000 Magazine Best-of-Show winners were Heroix RoboER and NSI Software Double-Take GeoCluster for Windows 2000/NT. Heroix RoboER, enables IT professionals to reach and repair otherwise inaccessible Win2K/NT systems from anywhere in the company, avoiding costly reboots. "RoboER has been developed to manage \[unattended\] Win2K/NT systems remotely," says Ken Leoni, Heroix director of business development. "RoboER enables access to systems in trouble--whether in the next room or around the world--allowing you to fix problems without serious disruption of critical business processes." RoboER provides a text-based command shell over TCP/IP or a serial connection to a standard COM port. NSI's Double-Take GeoCluster extends Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) clusters across multiple locations by replicating disks to each cluster node over any IP-based LAN, WAN, or storage area network (SAN). The product synchronizes replicated data volumes using standard TCP/IP, allowing great distances to separate nodes. The product improves existing backup schemes' reliability and performance by providing third-party backup applications with read-only access to open files on offline nodes. Winners in the Exchange Server category were Active Voice Corporation Unity 2.3 and Tacit Knowledge Systems Knowledge Mail. Active Voice Unity is no stranger to the Best-of-Show awards; a previous version won Best-of-Show at the Microsoft Exchange Conference 99 (MEC99). But Unity 2.3 improves on the previous version, providing a unified messaging solution for easy storage and retrieval of voice, fax, and email. Unity 2.3 sports a Web interface for simple management of voice email options, a text-to-speech engine for retrieving email over the phone, and interoperability with a wide range of phone mail systems. Tacit Knowledge Systems' KnowledgeMail product family transforms existing enterprise mail stores into automatic discovery and exchange knowledge assets, giving everyone in the enterprise access to public, private, and "tacit" knowledge while preserving user control and privacy. "KnowledgeMail makes it possible to discover and exchange the huge amount of rapidly changing knowledge trapped in routine email that can never be published as content and is therefore beyond the reach of the corporate portal," says David Gilmour, Tacit founder, president, and CEO. Judges selected award winners from a pool of approximately 100 entrants, basing their decisions on which products solved particular business needs in the most intuitive and elegant fashion. For more information about the winning products, see the following Web sites: SQL Server: Giganet Clan Host Adapters and Cluster Switches Knosys ProClarity Windows 2000: Heroix RoboER Heroix RoboER NSI Software Double-Take GeoCluster for Windows 2000/NT NSI Software Double-Take GeoCluster for Windows 2000/NT Exchange Server: Active Voice Corporation Unity 2.3 Active Voice Corporation Unity 2.3 Tacit Knowledge Systems Knowledge Mail Tacit Knowledge Systems Knowledge Mail
