Reviews /
CANE raises above Prophesy
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Our evaluation of two low cost alternatives to high-powered network modeling and simulation tools gives the nod to ImageNet's CANE.
You want to use network modeling and simulation to get a feel for how your network might react with higher speed circuits or a few new routers here and there. However, you don't want to shell out all that dough for the type of big budget production you get with market leading packages from the likes of Make Systems, Inc. or CACI Products Co.
Well, you're in luck. You've got a number of options that will only set you back a few hundred to a few thousand bucks compared to the tens of thousands you'd pay for higher powered packages. We looked at two such alternatives that are at opposite ends of this low cost scale, the $4,995 CANE from ImageNet, Inc. and the $595 Prophesy from Abstraction Software LLC.
Not only are the products at opposite ends of the cost spectrum, they both take very different approaches for how to build and simulate your models. CANE is more of a slave in that you pump in data, tell the package how to use that data and sit back while the software does all the heavy lifting required to build the model. Prophesy is more of a master that presents you with a series of dialog boxes that require you to tell it how to build the model.
CANE provides you with features that are similar to what you'll find in more high powered and costly products. For instance, the package makes it easy to build network models by simply dragging network device icons from a pre-installed library and dropping them into a network diagram. Once you show how the devices are linked and enter a few other parameters, CANE builds mathematical equations the simulation engine uses to calculate how that design will work.
By comparison, Prophesy is cumbersome and difficult to use for anyone other than seasoned modeling and simulation professionals. Where CANE automates a number of steps in the model building process, Prophesy places much greater demands on you. For instance, you first have to build your own device library and manually enter all the parameters required to build the math equations the simulation engine will use.
In essence, you first have to build a network modeling tool with Prophesy whereas ImageNet has already done that in CANE. In fact, Abstraction Software says you can use Prophesy to create models for everything from bank teller queues to making pizza.
The able CANE
The comprehensive built-in device library and support for computer aided design (CAD) diagrams is what really sets CANE apart. The library contains a wide variety of vendor-specific devices that enable you to drop icons for particular products directly into your model. Those icons will feed detailed information about everything from the number of interfaces on a device to its specific functionality directly into the model. CANE also enables you to edit information about those devices to reflect changes and to add your own devices to the library.Support for CAD is a big plus for experienced designers. You can import CAD drawings of a building into CANE and drag and drop your devices to exactly where you want them. For instance, you can sprinkle a number of switches into wiring closets on various floors. Using the building's dimensions embedded in the CAD drawing, CANE will even tell you how many feet of cable you'll need to link those switches and whether any switches are too far away from the others.
This CAD environment simplifies network design, evaluation and fine-tuning by affording you an easy way to test initial designs and make changes on the fly to see what will happen. For instance, CANE enables you to examine each link in detail as it verifies that the protocols and functions you've designed into the network will work.
Furthermore, CAD support enables you to lay-out high level network designs, estimate cost, prepare schedules and create fully detailed design drawings down to individual components and cables. You'll also find CANE's draft mode very useful during the proposal phase of a project as it enables you to quickly sketch-out and easily prototype somewhat less detailed designs.
If you work with IP networks, you'll appreciate CANE's IP Planner function, which automates address assignment as you add nodes. The feature can also be used to generate configuration files and host tables that you can load directly into your hosts, thus eliminating the risk of human error as addresses are input manually.
After running a simulation CANE automatically generates detailed runtime graphs that enable you to uncover knotty problems such as bottlenecks and excess capacity. CANE won't point these flaws out for you, though. It simply gives you the information needed to do it on your own.
Once familiar with CANE's basic features, you'll be surprised how easy it is to generate streamlined network plans, complete with detailed hardware specifications, layout documentation and cost estimates. Each time you make a change, just run the simulator and it automatically identifies incorrect or missing components, incorrect device configurations, incorrect IP addresses, and undefined links.
CANE's documentation, though sometimes difficult to follow, is both complete and a great improvement over previous releases. ImageNet also improved the user interface in this latest version by adopting the look and feel of Windows 95 applications. Previous releases used ImageNet's own user interface conventions.
Installation from the CD-ROM was uneventful, requiring less than 5 minutes. However, you should plan to begin by going through the tutorial and expect to consult the user's guide frequently until you're comfortable with the product. CANE requires either Windows 95 or NT 4.0. We experienced good performance on a 166MHz Pentium-based PC with 64M bytes of RAM and 250M bytes of available hard drive space.
The Prophesy forecast
While Prophesy lacks CANE's sophistication and broad functional integration, it is possible to perform most of the same network simulation functions once you've got enough experience with the package under your belt.However, it'll take you some time to not only gain that experience but to build your models with Prophesy. The package is a bare bones, hands-on simulator without CAD features and lacking a pre-installed device library.
We found it could take a competent network designer with little or no knowledge of simulation at least 20 hours just to learn how the program works. In contrast, when you're done with a short tutorial included with CANE, you know enough to get started.
The learning doesn't stop at 20 hours either. It will take much longer to become proficient in using Prophesy. The company even acknowledges in its documentation that you'll run into a large learning curve "unless you are a seasoned simulation practitioner."
The fact that Prophesy does not adhere to the look and feel of Windows 95 applications only adds to the learning curve. For example, clicking the "x" in the upper right corner of a box doesn't do anything. To close a box, you have to click a button bearing the image of a finger pointing up. These little quirks are not a big problem, but they illustrate the product's lack of refinement.
From a functional perspective, Prophesy has some drag-and-drop features that enable you to pull your custom designed devices out of a library and use them in network diagrams. In creating your own devices you must first obtain all the detailed information about them and validate that data with the manufacturer before you manually enter it.
Prophesy lacks the type IP address management found in CANE's IP Planner. The product is also missing the ability to automatically check IP addresses as well as undefined links and automatically generate configuration files and host tables. On the plus side, because Prophesy affords greater flexibility in working at more primitive levels, such as defining and testing radically non-standard component types.
Prophesy's documentation is quite good. A tutorial and supplied examples give you a good, easy to follow introduction to the product. If you want to learn about transactional analysis and queuing, you can do a lot of interesting things with Prophesy and you'll find its documentation is an excellent resource in that endeavor.
Installing Prophesy from its two high-density floppies was a little tedious. On the first try, the installation locked-up our computer. Running Symantec Corp.'s Norton Crash Guard as we installed Prophesy cleared things up but we never got to the root of the problem because Norton Crash Guard doesn't report on likely causes. We also experienced screen redraw problems with the number of colors set at 64,000. The problem got better when we dropped the number of colors to 256 and totally cleared up when we dropped video color depth to 16 colors.
All in all, we found CANE and Prophesy in stark contrast both functionally and in ease of use. Prophesy is a pretty good bare-bones simulator and little more. CANE is the clear winner because of tight integration of its CAD and simulation features, plus the extensive component library.
