Marketing rubber hits the reality road

Thursday, September 2, 2010 by Alan Taylor
network management and monitoring successThe world is full of marketing talk. Any company can say they are a “leader”, “largest” or “most comprehensive”.

Marketing messages and logos pop up everywhere. IBM recreated their logo on an atomic scale and Rolling Rock generated buzz by suggesting they were going to imprint their logo on the moon. I stepped out of my car the other day to see advertisements on the paint stripes in the parking lot. Seriously, everywhere.

But the real marketing rubber hits the reality road in two words: Customer Success. A Customer Success Story proves the marketing talk and puts the money where the mouth is. The exchange rate between regular marketing copy to Customer Success copy is something like 100:1 (look it up, I dare you).

So it’s a good thing to see yet another Customer Success piece published by Dorado Software. This one covers the immediate benefits experienced by Etisalat - one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world and the leading operator in the Middle East and Africa.

Etisalat deployed Dorado Redcell in February of this year to manage their international VPN network and expansion of that network to new territories. The impact of Redcell on their platform proved immediate benefits including:
  • Reduced OPEX by automating, simplifying operations
  • Service and customer co‐relation helps identify which customer is affected and saves time in resolving issues
  • MPLS services resource pooling helps control and ease service administration
  • Reduces reliance on technical staff – End‐customer inputs simple data to provision complex services
  • Provisions end‐to‐end services (set up, monitor) with no involvement from operational and engineering staff

Again, as proved in the plethora of Customer Success pieces on the Dorado downloads section, Redcell performs. From Etisalat to Telekom Malaysia, from California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to British Telecom, enterprises worldwide are discovering the power that Redcell provides them.

To see a complete listing of Success Stories reflecting Dorado's ability with numerous solutions including service provisioning, SNMP tools and SLA monitoring, browse over here.

Compliance and the network

Thursday, August 19, 2010 by Alan Taylor
Let’s dwell on IT and network compliance monitoring for a moment.

Typically when someone says this, most individuals either look for the exit or see an opportunity for a nap. But compliance, as a subject matter, doesn’t have to be down there with M&M sorting or Actuarial Science (no offense, it’s just that, on the surface, that sounds a little dry). It’s a serious matter that helps with more than just meeting regulatory requirements.  And it’s probably one of the top 10 most important matters your company faces.

Suppose you’re a Network Engineer, your company is in the catbird seat of being acquired by a public Fortune N company and your stock price just went stratospheric. With both companies being public, the ensuing due diligence activities will result in some serious peering at your SOX compliance, your PCI DSS if you hold credit card information and your HIPAA if you deal with health records. I’ll stop there but the compliance acronym list can continue for a significant amount of letters if you deal with a lot of personal information. 

A chink (or gaping hole) in your Network compliance monitoringcompliance armor could be an unpleasant discovery during due diligence. Not only can it hurt the sale price (or worse, scuttle the deal), it can also bring a more granular and deeper investigation into Network, NOC, Datacenter and overall IT practices. Ever have that dream where you’re in public in nothing but your underwear?

With all of the benefits that Dorado Software provides to customers, compliance is one of the unsung heroes. For instance, the features included in our Redcell Change Manager, or even our ProScan product alone, can quickly help your organization become more aligned with numerous compliance requirements.

Redcell’s ProScan even has the ability to look for and report on very specific parameters and attributes such as access control/firewall entries and routing parameters. Even better for the granular investigations sometimes required by compliance audits. Not only do you have a world-class enterprise network monitoring software, you bring yourself closer to compliance!

For more information on Redcell Change Manager and ProScan, browse over to the Dorado Software website.

Discover Hidden Resources

Friday, July 23, 2010 by Alan Taylor
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.
IT Inventory Software
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

Identify your bandwidth hogs

Tuesday, July 20, 2010 by Alan Taylor
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.
Identify your bandwidth hogs
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.

Dorado Customer Success - UK Service Provider

Saturday, July 10, 2010 by Alan Taylor
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!

Cisco Live and Customer Successes

Tuesday, July 6, 2010 by Alan Taylor
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.

Dorado Software IT Network Management Success StoryOne 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!

Dorado’s Redcell V6 Service Studio Service Activation Definitions

Friday, June 18, 2010 by Alan Taylor
We consider Dorado’s Redcell V6 Service Studio a significant step forward in the ongoing effort to help service providers and network managers improve time-to-market, streamline service provisioning and realize new revenues. In this post we continue to highlight the benefits of Redcell V6 Service Studio and specifically the service activation definition aspect.

To reiterate, Redcell Service Studio offers an intuitive, feature-rich toolset to model custom network services (ones that aren’t already defined in Redcell’s expansive library) that span equipment from one or more vendors. 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.

Service activation with Redcell Service Studio easily dovetails with the discovery aspect, giving the provider the ability to both discover new devices and provide services via those devices using definitions created by Service Studio. While other network management provders offer service definition and activation, 70% of the cost is typically borne through professional services. Redcell’s capabilities using Service Studio reduces that percentage significantly by providing service schemas that are easily created and modified.

The screenshot below, showing the attribute settings of the service data schema, helps make this point. This is a view of the actual service schema for the Redcell out-of-the-box VPLS Service for Juniper devices (Juniper management, Cisco management along with numerous other manufacturers are all supported via Redcell) . One area to notice are the default values, drop-downs, constraints, and minimum / maximum data type length thresholds. These options make data entry much easier and provide validation via a GUI-driven environment. Nice. Also, all of the services modeled in Service Studio are managed in the standard Redcell Service Center just like any other service. Very nice.

Juniper management definition example

Dorado V6 Service Studio - Discovery

Wednesday, June 9, 2010 by Alan Taylor
In an earlier post we announced the release of Dorado’s Redcell V6 Service Studio. In this post we briefly drill down into the Discovery aspect of V6 Service Studio and it's contribution to Dorado's enterprise network monitoring software.

In a nutshell, Service Studio Discovery enables our customers and partners to quickly and effectively 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.

The discovery aspect of Service Studio works in concert with service definitions to persist and represent the discovered services in inventory. In other management systems, this ability to parse the network, discover existing services and bring that information back into the system typically requires teams of professional services. Dorado customers and partners can use a graphical interface with very little (to no) additional programming to quickly accomplish what used to be a large effort.

The two screenshots below show the GUI for the Service Discovery Profile Settings and an example of discovery via configuration files. This example exhibits Cisco management capabilities although the same features can apply to Juniper management and countless other brands of infrastructure equipment. Two important facets of Service Studio and the improved discovery capabilities inherent in the system.

Network and infrastructure discovery using Dorado V6 Service Studio

Fast network discovery using Dorado V6 Service Studio

Carriers suffering growing pains - the end of "all you can eat"

Friday, June 4, 2010 by Alan Taylor
Maybe you've seen one of today's top articles: AT&T dropping their unlimited data plans for new customers. This a direct result of the introduction of so many carrier network-hungry devices (and the attendant carrier hungry applications). If you haven't seen it, it is great reading: http://yhoo.it/apvfHI.

It's an understandable and expected move - especially when you think about the droves of users expected to come onto the network in the near future (cellular giant Ericsson predicts a doubling of users each year for the next 5 years). Also, imagine a few million people watching Glee reruns in HD on their iPads and you get the picture. This scenario will understandably force carrier grade networks to move steadily towards the data usage plans already developed for typical land-line usage.

But, the most interesting part of the article is what's missing: any discussion around expanding the carrier network and providing higher bandwidth to consumers. Instead the article dwells on charging the heavy users for using the network. With more and more applications being written for smart devices, many of them applying little thought to conserving bandwidth usage, it's understandable that unlimited data can be a black hole for carriers (and is doomed). The bigger message here is the inexorable march towards bigger and faster mobile networks and the need to adopt LTE / 4G technologies sooner than later.

The other message here is how will carriers maintain an acceptable ARPU and remain profitable. How will they financially justify the move to LTE / 4G? Charge for streaming HD? Show advertisements next to all served content? Create and serve content themselves?

The Complete Network Assessment

Thursday, May 27, 2010 by Alan Taylor
The Complete Network AssessmentThe 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 Releases Redcell V6 Service Studio

Wednesday, May 19, 2010 by Alan Taylor
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..

Dorado unveils Redcell V6 Service Studio

Tuesday, May 18, 2010 by Alan Taylor
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.

The Impact of Carrier Ethernet on Mobile Service Providers

Thursday, May 13, 2010 by Alan Taylor
Carrier Ethernet for Mobile BackhaulIf 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.

Lights-Out IT Management

Thursday, May 6, 2010 by Alan Taylor
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 Providers

The Complete Network Assessment

The One Hour Network Assessment

VIP Passes Available for TM Forum Management World 2010 in Nice

Wednesday, April 28, 2010 by Alan Taylor
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!

 

Daniel Okine, Director of Solutions Strategy for Dorado Speaking at Network Automation 2010 in Paris

Thursday, April 22, 2010 by Alan Taylor

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

Thursday, April 15, 2010 by Alan Taylor
Next Generation Data Center ManagementDorado Software - Next Generation Data Center Montoring and 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.

The Linklight: Dorado Software’s user forum an essential place for in-depth information

Friday, April 9, 2010 by Alan Taylor
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/

Big Conferences, Big Solutions from Dorado

Thursday, April 8, 2010 by Alan Taylor
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 2010

Symantec Vision - http://go.symantec.com/takecontrolDorado Software and Symantec
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/Dorado Software at Interop
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 2010

Juniper Partner Summit Americas - http://www.juiper.net/Dorado Software Monitor Juniper Equipment
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/Dorado Software at Management World
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/Dorado Software supports Juniper Equipment
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!

Dorado Mention: How to choose and implement automated configuration management tools

Thursday, March 25, 2010 by Alan Taylor
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!