One of the most troubling aspects of network management, especially managing a far-reaching network is the potential for undiscovered devices and assets. Not only are undiscovered devices a potential liability in terms of updates, network drain and unmonitored activity, they also pose lost revenue potentials. IT audit software and IT inventory software is a high-priority when discovering devices complex, multi-vendor environemnts.
Dorado's
Redcell Inventory Management Solution can solve the problem of undiscovered devices and assets – in just 2 clicks. State of the art in terms of network discovery tools, the Redcell Inventory Management Solution is a fully automated inventory lifecycle management solution that can change the way you visualize and report on your resources. Redcell is supported by Dorado's powerful discovery engine that recognizes any network-aware device including customer premise equipment (CPE), routers, switches, wireless access points, servers, PCs, printers, etc. Device configuration data is supplied by Redcell's extensive device driver library covering thousands of the most popular networked equipment.
With Redcell Inventory Management you can:
* Use Deep Discovery to identify logical entities such as interfaces, sub-interfaces, ports, links, services, users and even passwords
* View the network from various perspectives, so you can research aspects of the network and find components that meet a certain criteria
* Report on inventory status, distributing strategic information to executives and other decision-makers throughout the company
* Automate resynchronization to ensure the physical and logical network content is always current and compliant with your policies and service level agreements
Redcell shows you the big picture:
How the network is connected, how equipment is being used, who owns each device, who is impacted, and which services are deployed.
Learn more about Dorado’s Redcell Inventory Management Solution
A recent campaign by
Dorado Software regarding network monitoring and bandwidth usage is getting a good amount of attention.
Bandwidth hogs have been around since there have been networks. Some high-bandwidth usage is to be expected from most companies: software uploads and downloads, data porting and other activities. The problem with bandwidth arises when users begin oversubscribing to YouTube, Hulu and other high-bandwidth streaming services - requiring a tighter application of network management.
There are a number of techniques used to stem bandwidth abuse. By throttling or lowering priority of specific types of traffic or specific websites, a network engineer can effectively lower incidents – until new types of traffic or new websites come online: a constant game of whack-a-mole.
Another technique is to continue increasing available bandwidth – a costly option that never identifies the real culprits.
Leveraging IP network monitroing software to identify specific bandwidth hogs helps to permanently stem bandwidth abuse. By identifying specific workstations, resources and / or protocols contributing to bandwidth abuse, steps can be taken to reduce the ongoing abuse.
Dorado’s bandwidth identifier helps to identify bandwidth hogs and provides easy-to-understand graphs and reports that shows how users, applications and protocols are consuming bandwidth. You are also able to remediate problem quickly using Dorado Software by pinpointing degraded network resources.
See more about how you can get complete visibility into your IP Traffic behavior by
getting a free trial here.
In a recent post we covered a
Customer Success Story available on our website that highlighted Dorado Software’s ability to gain control of an enterprise IT network, including network monitoring, network management and network traffic analysis.
There’s another
success story on the Dorado Website that speaks to our ability to provide similar successes in a service provider solution. You can see the success story
here.
In brief, a tier one service provider in the UK implemented Dorado Redcell in order to secure a valuable contract with a high-profile client. In order to secure the agreement, the service provider was required to provide automated flow-through provisioning for network devices. Dorado’s suite of Redcell solutions met all the Service Provider’s needs including delivering flow‐through provisioning, automated configuration of Juniper MPLS devices and custom hardware, and integration with third‐party software. Not only did Dorado Software enable the Service Provider to secure the lucrative contract, it realized the added benefits of security, a high ROI and a more optimized network environment.
For more success stories, white papers, data sheets and solution notes, click on over to our
"downloads" page. There are many helpful articles and reports on the industry and Dorado solutions. Happy reading!
We here at Dorado Software had a great time at Cisco Live and thoroughly enjoyed the virtual experience at the Cisco Live & Networkers Virtual website at
http://www.ciscolive.com/virtual/. Not only does it represent a great portal to the Cisco conference, it is a valuable ongoing cache of information from Cisco events all year long. From Cisco management to network traffic analysis and more, it's there in the virtual site. We are pleased to be a part of the virtual event (you can find our booth in the “exhibitors” section) and look forward to the growth and evolution of this great tool. If you haven’t joined already, please do (it’s free) and spend some time perusing all that happened at the recent Cisco Live event in Las Vegas.
One thing that particularly struck us during the event was the interest in our “Light Reading” material and especially the Customer Success write-ups that were posted on the site. One of these success stories, following the
Dorado Software implementation at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations, is a great example of how our solutions can help organizations garner more control over expansive, growing and dynamic networks.
The main challenges in this success story are managing change within a converging, multi-vendor IT network management infrastructure, reducing manual processes and errors and reducing disparate tools all under a tight budget. The key benefits that Dorado provides in answer to these challenges are a single management interface for a multi-vendor network, automated management of the end-to-end infrastructure, granular inventory and change management and easy and affordable scalability.
We are happy with the ability to get the word out about our award-winning solutions and look forward to additional opportunities within the Cisco networking world to showcase our solutions. Stay tuned for more!
Are you lucky enough to be in France this week? If you are, the first thing on your mind is undoubtedly the MEF Network Automation Conference taking place in Paris. Our very own Francois Lorcery of
Dorado Software will be presenting - and here's what's on the agenda:
MEF Network Automation
Compliance Lifecycle: Achieve Cost-Effective and Automated PCI Compliance
Presenting a
Compliance Lifecycle approach that provides a framework to help organizations achieve PCI compliance cost effectively and enable automation of tedious manual tasks. Compliance Lifecycle drives a holistic approach to PCI compliance in the network, thus enabling an end-to-end, closed loop process for better control.
Enabling organizations to define and execute stages in sequence, with opportunity to automate each stage, thus, taking the manual effort and error out of network compliance process.
How the automation of the Compliance Lifecycle helps to reduce total cost of ownership and mitigate technical and operational risks while providing a greater visibility into the
security status of the IT environment.
Where & when:
Paris, France
Novotell Convention and Wellness
June 1-3, 2010
Speaking: Francois Lorcery
Compliance Lifecycle: Achieve Cost-Effective and Automated PCI Compliance
The Dorado Software
downloads section is a quality repository of solution notes, data sheets, white papers and podcasts that cover a wide variety of topics. From drill-down information regarding Dorado’s suite of network management tools to the latest information on LTE and 4G and enterprise network management, our downloads section contains some great reading.
Two of the white papers that we regularly refer to are titled
“The Complete Network Assessment” and
“The One-Hour Network Assessment”. These documents lay out a clear path on how an enterprise IT organization can quickly and effectively perform network assessments and provide subsequent reporting. Below is an excerpt form “The Complete Network Assessment”. To download the complete white papers, free of charge,
follow this link.
“The only thing constant in the network world is change. The network is in place to
support mission-critical applications that are constantly being updated with needs for new protocols, services, or greater bandwidth. Network assessment is vital to the health of any network as well as a key tool in identifying underutilized or out-of-date resources. A complete network assessment can identify elements in your network that are in need of an upgrade or replacement and elements in your network that can fulfill service or growth needs. Network assessment could be an easy task if network elements were all from a single vendor, in a single room, and managed by the same person. The fact is, though, that this is seldom the case.”
Dorado Software, Inc. (http://doradosoftware.com), a leading provider of infrastructure and service management software, today announced the availability of Redcell v6 Service Studio, the revolutionary new creation platform to deploy IP services without having to worry about the underlying network infrastructure. Redcell Service Studio offers an intuitive, feature-rich toolset to model custom network services that span equipment from one or more vendors. Dorado Software will showcase Redcell Service Studio, in addition to the Redcell suite of Resource, Service and Health/ Performance management products, in booth 18 at the TM Forum, May 18-20th at the Acropolis Congress Center in Nice, France..
With increasing competitive pressures, service providers must react quickly to reduce churn, improve time-to-market and realize new revenues. Historically, due to network complexity, new services were rolled out manually by operations teams, leading to slow, error-prone deployments. Redcell Service Studio eliminates these issues and also the long development cycles typically required to deploy custom services, enabling service providers to get new services to market quicker than ever before.
With Redcell Service Studio, service providers can model any service type from end-to-end or in part, including FTTx, mobile backhaul, Ethernet, LTE and Multi-media. Additionally, this toolset empowers service providers to implement modifications to their network services as their business evolves over time, without incurring huge development costs or incurring prohibitive supplier lead times.
The automation capabilities provided by the Redcell Service Studio frees the service provider to concentrate on rapid content delivery instead of coding infrastructure to integrate into the Redcell suite of monitoring, resource and service management products. A service definition built with Redcell Service Studio is automatically part of Redcell's inventory and is therefore exposed during runtime for discovery, reporting, monitoring, provisioning (activation), and graphical topology views.
The Redcell Service Studio enables the following aspects of the service:
Service Definition: Model the service's schema, define the GUI behavior for data entry, and define the tasks as a workflow to perform provisioning and diagnostics.
Discovery Definition: Define and implement tasks to discover pre-existing services from the network or other sources such as device configuration files. This also permits importing service data in various formats including CSV and XML, or live from the network using CLI based show commands.
Pool Definition: Define network resource pools for IP address allocation or VLAN ID allocation for example, to automate service data entry and ensure that IDs that must be globally unique for service endpoints are never assigned overlapping values.
In combination with Redcell's Device Driver Software Development Kit, The Redcell Device Driver Factory, virtually "any service" for "any device" can be added to Redcell Service Center. Since time to market is critical, the Redcell Service Studio toolset hands control of network service rollout back to the service provider, enabling them to meet their business objectives and customer obligations without external dependencies..
It’s a big day at Dorado – especially in the Dorado Software booth at the TM Forum in Nice, France where they are actively demonstrating the new Redcell V6 Service Studio.
This morning’s press release says it all and you can see it
here on the Dorado Software website. In a nutshell, Redcell V6 Service Studio is Dorado’s revolutionary new creation platform where IP services can be developed and deployed rapidly without the traditional infrastructure network development cycles. Service types including FTTx, mobile backhaul, LTE, Ethernet and Multi-media can be modeled and deployed without incurring huge development costs or waiting on supplier's lead-time for solutions.
In addition, definitions built with Redcell’s Service Studio is automatically included in Redcell’s inventory and exposed during runtime for discover, reporting, monitoring, provisioning and topology views.
Read the finer details in the
press release. Future blogs will be drilling-down on Redcell Service Studio’s features and benefits.
If you haven’t explored the
white paper section of the Dorado website, it’s worth a piece of your time. For instance, there’s a great
white paper available that takes a look at managing next generation service provider networks. The upside of the advent of mobile internet service is the ability for service providers to expand their footprint and market share by a significant percentage. This will only come if Service Providers are able to meet the demand while maintaining efficient networks and smoothly transitioning to Carrier Ethernet for Mobile Backhaul.
The challenges of transitioning to Carrier Ethernet include the costly mistakes made in infrastructure planning if not carried out effectively. These mistakes can result in an unsatisfied public, increased competition and loss of market share.
The paper goes on to explain further challenges that service providers experience from the
“dizzying array of potential solutions for addressing carrier ethernet for mobile backhaul”. These divergent solutions create problems in terms of managing the entire network: different vendors provide different management solutions. Trying to manage an expansive carrier ethernet network using a myriad of management applications only leads to problems.
We don’t want to spoil the ending but you can probably deduce that the
Dorado Redcell family of tools has something to do with the solution. Download the whitepaper for yourself and get ready for a good read.
It seems like these days, talk of
cloud computing and
network virtualization is all the rage. And there's nothing wrong with that! Virtualization can save valuable storage and energy resources, while there are myriad advantages to the cloud for both consumers and providers.
To celebrate the history of automated network management and remediation - where we've come from and where we're going - I did a little '
digging in the crates' to find a few of our past hits.
********
Here is an older press release. One of the things we pride ourselves at here at Dorado is being on ahead of the curve.
DORADO SOFTWARE ANNOUNCES REDCELL SYSTEMS COMMANDER FOR AUTOMATED MANAGEMENT OF VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTSI won't post the whole release - you can
read it yourself here - but Dorado has been thinking about automated management of virtualized environments for a long time.
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Here is a more recent event:
DORADO SOFTWARE PRESENTS PACKET-READY, ZERO-TOUCH SERVICE PROVISIOINING AT THE MOBILE BACKHAUL ASIA IN BANGKOKThis was a presentation built on our long record of providing world-class solutions for Service Providers.
Scott described an extensible and scalable architecture that consists of resource management for traditional FCAPs and flexible, cost-effective backhaul service configuration and activation.
He also spoke on specific network and service management requirements including: Class of Service requirements aligned with 3GPP, 3GPP2 and 802.16/WiMAX based services, other classes for OAM, control traffic, and Synchronization; performance, reliability and availability requirements, monitoring Ethernet services, and enabling
Service Providers to customize their service offerings.
********
Learn more about Dorado Software
We were just perusing the collection of white papers on the
Dorado Software website and ran across a great write-up regarding lights-out IT Management. If you haven’t seen the actual white paper,
you can get it here.
In a nutshell, Lights-Out IT Management is the ability to provide automated remediation including event, configuration, service level and security management in an unattended environment. This helps move IT resources further up the food chain – being able to provide value-add services to the enterprise instead of maintaining the “status quo”.
Lights-Out IT Management also covers the trifecta of IT responsibilities:
- Find – Automatic discovery of all IT infrastructure elements
- Configure – Automatically configure a service and IT infrastructure elements – especially the rote configurations
- Monitor – Maintain a highly-intelligent infrastructure monitoring scheme including Network Availability Management and WAN monitoring.
When implementing Lights-Out IT Management, the major tactical benefits fall into these categories:
- Configuration Management – Reduce / eliminate manual configuration – especially rote configurations
- Event Management – Monitoring events for conditions that may lead to a fault. Proactively take remediation measures.
- Service Level Management – Ensure SLAs are being met and feed violations to a fault management component
- Security Management – Ensure security policies are not being violated.
By converting manual network tasks into automated routines, an IT department can move resources towards customer-facing services and create more value for the enterprise. Automated management tools should be able to handle these tasks:
- An integrated system that supports find, configure and monitor functions
- Support for customizable user interface
- Multi-vendor, multi-element, multi-domain support
- Service-level awareness and reporting
- Support for virtualized environments
- Support for physical and logical network topologies and root cause analysis
- Integrated functionality across the Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, Security (FCAPS) model and Service Level Management
- The ability to assist in the rapid creation and/or modification of a service
- Support of a sophisticated CMDB
- A high degree of automation within each function and across functions
- Ease of integration with other network management tools
Of course, Dorado software is a prime candidate for these operations and can help an IT department realize improved efficiencies and higher levels of service.
A sampling of other white papers at the Dorado website:
Impact of Carrier Ethernet on Service ProvidersThe Complete Network AssessmentThe One Hour Network Assessment
Speaking of conferences, look for Dorado in Booth 18 at the
TM Forum Management World 2010 conference in Nice France from May 18 – 20. TM Forum Management World 2010, now in its 11th year, is a leading global communications management conference for the information, communications and entertainment industries.
Dorado Software is excited to be exhibiting at the conference, showing our service provider solutions, and demonstrating how our Redcell products dovetail into the conference’s 6 separate summits:
• Growth through New Content & Innovative Services
• Enabling Profitable Cloud Services
• Successful Business Transformation
• Driving Technology & Operational Excellence
• Revenue Management & Profitability
• Excellent Customer Experience
Also, Dorado has a limited supply of VIP passes to the conference available to interested parties that make an Executive Appointment with Dorado Software. Simply
contact us and schedule an appointment and a VIP entrance to the TMForum Management conference is yours. We think a quick discussion of our service provider software will be well worth the time spent.
Contact us here. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone at the conference and are thrilled to be able to show how Dorado Software can help usher in the new, transformational services being discussed at the conference. See you there!
If you’re lucky enough to be in Europe in early June, make sure and attend The Network Automation 2010 conference in Paris. From the 1st to the 3rd of June, a select group of industry experts will be convening at the Novotel Convention & Wellness Center to discuss how to “Successfully Reduce OPEX”. Our own
Daniel Okine, Director of Solutions Strategy for
Dorado, will be presenting on day two (Thursday). His talk is titled “Compliance Lifecycle: Achieve Cost-Effective and Automated PCI Compliance” and is sure to be a compelling and informative presentation.
Here’s a brief on his talk:
Presenting a Compliance Lifecycle approach that provides a framework to help organizations achieve PCI compliance cost effectively and enable automation of tedious manual tasks. Compliance Lifecycle drives a holistic approach to PCI compliance in the network, thus enabling an end-to-end, closed loop process for better control.
- Enabling organizations to define and execute stages in sequence, with opportunity to automate each stage, thus, taking the manual effort and error out of network compliance process.
- How the automation of the Compliance Lifecycle helps to reduce total cost of ownership and mitigate technical and operational risks while providing a greater visibility into the security status of the IT environment.
You can see more information about the conference
here.
Next Generation Data Center Management
If you haven’t taken a look at our
Next Generation Data Center Management presentation, it’s worth the few minutes of your time. You have a choice of taking in the whole presentation from Data Center Challenges to Cloud Computing Visibility and how Dorado can help find, configure, monitor and manage network resources or you can select from numerous chapters including:
- Data Center Challenges
- Redcell Solutions
- Find IT resources
- Configure IT resources
- Monitor IT resources
The presentation does a great job of identifying the numerous network management areas where Redcell helps to solve complexity when it comes to converging infrastructures, silo management, unified communications and virtualization.
Maybe you’re already sold on Dorado’s Redcell capabilities and want to show or explain to others the benefits of Redcell’s complete unified end-to-end solution for the next generation data center. The presentation is a great way to provide peers and decision makers a brief yet thorough overview of the power of Redcell.
We're well into day 2 at Symantec Vision and getting closer to information overload. If your there and haven't already, stop by booth 21 to see Dorado Software. If there's still room in your brain for more info you need to learn how to see the whole picture... solve problems faster. The Redcell Integration Component does make the problem solving faster. And who doesn't want that!?! Key features include:
Network Discovery Tools
Network Topology
Inventory
Monitoring
OS Deployment
Configuration
Network Compliance Monitoring
Reporting
Multi-technology
Networking
Security
Storage
All in a virtualized environment!
And if you are already in the information overload stage then at least stop by to pick up one of those great slap and wrap koozies. I'm telling you, this is one will make it home with you. The lay flat so you can pack them easily for the trip home. Even better, once you're home they lay flat in the drawer for easy use with your favorite adult beverage or pop. That's right I said pop! I refuse to conform to using soda! Besides that you'll get an entry for one of those new iPads. Double entry if you attend the technical session on Thursday. Topic is "Do you know your network in a virtualized environment?" Thursday at 11:30am Room 110. Should be worth the wait... and more information to cram into your head. Just what you wanted!
You’re not at Vision? You can still get all the information you can handle. The Symantec Vision website has videos of their key notes, recaps and much much more. Plus you can always hit up Dorado Software's website to learn about the Redcell Integration Component for Symantec Altiris Solutions, for additional info or if you just want a free slap and wrap koozie email Symantec@doradosoftware.com.
Dorado Software’s user forum,
“The Linklight”, is a place where Dorado software users can participate in and get in-depth information on a variety of topics related to network management and monitoring. From network architecture and network monitoring to network tools and utilities, The Linklight provides a forum where Dorado product managers, lead engineers and other key Dorado experts are available to answer questions and engage in community discussion regarding all things network management and monitoring.
While there are a million forums out there discussing various topics surrounding network management, Dorado’s Linklight is the only place where there is such a concentration of Dorado expertise waiting to engage. Check it out at
http://www.doradosoftware.com/thelinklight/
We’re busy gearing up for the conference season (does it ever actually take a break?) and can’t wait to show attendees our new network and device deployment, monitoring, management and inventory tools. Below are a few of the conferences we are attending in the immediate future. Make sure and stop by the Dorado Software area for some in-depth discussion regarding industry challenges and Dorado solutions!
April 2010Symantec Vision - http://go.symantec.com/takecontrol
Las Vegas, NV - April 12-15, 2010
We’ll be talking about the transparent datacenter: the seamless integration of network and systems management which creates a management environment where the complete datacenter is visible from one console. Also, our
Facebook page says there may be an Ipad available for a lucky attendant at our technical session at this event!
Interop - http://www.interop.com/
Las Vegas, NV - April 25-29th, 2010
Look for Dorado Software and all of our network and device monitoring tools in the Dell Pavilion. We’re concentrating our discussion here to supporting the entire fabric of your datacenter including tighter integration with Dell on OpenManage products and support for Brocade.
May 2010Juniper Partner Summit Americas - http://www.juiper.net/
Phoenix, AZ - May 24-26th, 2010
You probably already know that Dorado's Targeted Solutions are specialized Redcell product packages that are tuned for Juniper Networks features and markets. Dorado offers Targeted Solutions for Juniper E-series packages and we’ll be showing off the capabilities of our Targeted Solutions at this conference.
Management World 2010 - http://www.tmforum.org/
The Acropolis Congress Center in Nice, France - May 18-20, 2010
With the rapid advent of mobile backhaul, carrier Ethernet and LTE, we’ll be spending a lot of our time here discussing ways to deploy, monitor and manage these new technologies and protocols. Any service, any device: ask us.
Juniper Partner Summit EMEA - http://www.juniper.net/
Barcelona, Spain
Again, we can’t wait to show off what we’ve been working on. Make sure and stop by our area for more information.
Also, in the meantime,
become a fan of our Facebook page to get updates regarding our conferences and news. See you at the conferences!
Another fun problem solved this week! One of my favorite customers wanted to explore a new use case. He wanted to query generic devices that are SNMP capable. His goal was to capture some
SNMP attributes from them and then run reports on data returned. Think IP address Monitor with or without alarm notifications and with options of adding other device attributes. He was able to import those device specific MIBs and created monitors to read the data from the field. He then was able to run a report showing those attributes save it in a spreadsheet and away he went! With the ability to change the interval of the polling, this allows him to tweak as needed. Yippee!
Several months ago we put together a presentation on
Network Change & Configuration Management that had some pretty cool nuggets. It was spearheaded by our own Mike Grote, Dorado Software's VP of Product Management.
Regardless of what systems or procedures you decide to choose for running your own network, there are 3 attributes that every NCCM system should deliver. To wit:
1. Complete visibility of your IT environment
(including automated discovery of devices, interfaces AND connectivity
2. Flexible yet controlled configuration options
(this sounds contradictory, but what it really means is that the system should provide multiple configuration options that best suit your own individual processes because every network is unique)
3. Proactive Change Detection, Analysis, Remediation and Reporting
(in other words detecting any changes in your network ought to be easy, accurate & automatic)
Mike also put together a nice illustration of the entire NCCM life cycle. Again - regardless of the solution you choose for your own infrastructure management solution - here is what the NCCM life cycle generally looks like:
- Deep Discovery
- Inventory
- Deploy & Configure
- Service Enablement
- Update & Patch
- Change Detection & Compliance
- > and back to Deep Discovery
It is even better when you can automate these functions. The entire 35-minute
webcast presentation - along with
free trials of Redcell for Enterprise - are available at Dorado Software's
website. We hope this information helps as you plan the next generation of your infrastructure!
*Note: Dorado Software's Redcell suite of network management products are trusted some of the largest, most mission-critical infrastructures on Earth. These include AT&T, British Telecom, Telekom Malaysia and Boeing Advanced Systems. To learn more or request a demo of Redcell please contact us.
Dorado gets another mention by people in the know. This time it’s from
SearchNetworking.com. In the
current article on TechWatch, it explains how to choose and implement automated configuration management tools.
Especially interesting is how Dorado already meets the majority of the items needing consideration. Such as:
- A successful closed loop configuration management tool (CLCM) includes detailed templates that perform the actions and specify a set of conditions that must be met. Check.
- Actions to be taken based on several conditions including, in the event of a failure, returning the network to previous configuration. Got that.
- Integration between configuration tools, fault management tools including auto discovery. With Dorado’s suite of network tools, all this can be handled from a single console.
We’re glad to see the increasing press on our line of
network management, configuration, monitoring and asset inventory products. A great product deserves great press!
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