Dorado's Redcell Suite is about more than just policy; it also offers performance and fault management. In fact, the product's fault-management capabilities will have a new revision by the time you read this, moving it from a relatively static process to a more dynamic one.
The suite runs in Dorado's Oware middleware environment, letting Redcell's server and device drivers, as well as the event and performance modules and database, run in a distributed fashion, much as Orchestream's does.
It's possible to define QoS and access polices in version 2.1, and DiffServ and IP Precedence setting is an option as well. But unlike with Service Activator, where we were able to easily determine what the IP Precedence bit defaults had been set to, we could find no mention in Redcell's documentation of how to cull this information.
Redcell does come with some canned policy profiles that can be applied to policy targets. The profiles are defined separately from the polices, allowing policy definitions, like Gold, Silver or Bronze, to be applied on differing schedules to dissimilar groups of devices.
A GUI Mess
One bright spot in a gloomy GUI is Redcell's Policy Wizard, which does a nice job of holding newbies' hands when they're creating policies. The Java GUI application, however, is a hog that sucked up all the resources we threw at it. At the end of our testing, Dorado let us know that its minimum hardware requirements had changed. Our 600-MHz, 512-MB, single-processor machine was one processor and 256 MB of RAM short. The company says it expects customers to take advantage of the Oware distributed middleware bus, thus avoiding these problems.
The GUI also lacks common usability features, such as right-click pop-up menus, context launches and multipath function access. Also in version 2.1, the Java GUI is an application, not able to execute as an applet within a browser. Dorado said the functionality and performance of the GUI in version 3.0 has improved dramatically. This is something we'd like to see given that, in addition to experiencing poor performance, we periodically lost contact with the server and had to restart the entire system.
The product supports users and groups, with very granular access control over all the application's functionality. For the most part, the function menu options are constrained by access limitations, with a couple of exceptions that, when chosen, would pop up a message box warning that permission to the function hadn't been granted. In all, very straightforward.
Dorado defines Redcell's access as multitenancy-capable, but the product really doesn't partition the system nor allow creation of and access to subgroups based on a customer subset of objects, such as devices or circuits. Redcell is able to access any LDAP-compliant directory for authentication.
As for discovery, Redcell found our Cisco 7200 and Juniper devices. However, the Cisco devices weren't discovered as 7200 routers or even as routers. This is a common problem with network discovery, stemming from the vendor's not having all SNMP system identifiers registered. It might seem that a Cisco 7200 would have a single identifier, but no, that would be too easy. Actually, 7200s have four identifiers. Dorado had two registered, and we had the other two.
By the time you read this, Dorado will have released version 3.0 of Redcell. It was, in fact, technically available in December when we were wrapping up this review, but without device drivers to push policy out. This is the special hell occupied by policy vendors -- whenever they release new versions of their software, or infrastructure vendors have new releases, the device drivers must be tested completely for conformance.
As with Formulator, pricing for Redcell is a bit complicated. This is partly because Dorado has other network-management products that leverage the Oware middleware bus. So while the initial cost is a bit heavier, the middleware is already in place when additional modules are purchased. Like Service Activator, Redcell is priced on a per-server (called by Dorado an Administrative Seat), per-device-driver-per-server basis, with device drivers defined per vendor. For example, all Cisco's gear is handled with a single device driver. The vendor gave us a $45,000 per-server base price for the 3.0 version.
Redcell Suite 2.1. Available: Now. Dorado Software, (888) 939-9959, (916) 673-1100; fax (916) 673-1044. www.doradosoftware.com or sales@doradosoftware.com
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