Riverbed tightens ties between its Cascade and Steelhead appliances
Visibility into how applications and systems are performing is a prerequisite for a successful WAN optimization deployment. After all, if a company doesn’t have a good sense of which WAN links are most congested, for instance, or how certain bottlenecks impact a key business process, how can it make the best decisions about where to deploy any WAN acceleration gear?
Nearly four months after closing its acquisition of Mazu Networks, Riverbed Technology has unveiled a new version of the Cascade appliances gained in the deal.
Riverbed’s Cascade appliances specialize in network traffic analysis and reporting. Using network behavior analysis, the Cascade gear can discover dependencies among different users and applications, and create a baseline for typical application and system behavior. Deployed in conjunction with Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances, Cascade can help companies determine the best places to invest in WAN optimization.
In the new version, Cascade 8.3, Riverbed has tightened the ties to its WAN optimization gear and boosted its visibility and reporting capabilities, adding more automated features and consolidated dashboards, for instance.
“Our customers have been asking for more than just optimization. They need new solutions to manage their WAN and understand the benefits of WAN optimization in their own environment. Over the last three months we’ve integrated Cascade into WAN optimization environments, beyond the capabilities of other application monitoring and visibility offerings,” said Alan Saldich, vice president of product marketing, in a statement.
Among the new features is auto-detection of Steelhead appliances. Cascade 8.3 can automatically detect Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances and group the different WAN interfaces and associated NetFlow data as belonging to optimized sites or non-optimized sites.
Riverbed also has made it easier for business users to access WAN optimization reports. With one click, users can access reports such as: overall WAN analysis, which provides a view of most used applications, potential congestion spots and problematic application performance; optimization candidate analysis, which identifies sites and applications that could benefit most from Steelhead deployment; optimization benefit analysis, which presents information about which sites are benefiting from optimization and how much bandwidth is being saved; and site capacity analysis, which provides the data IT managers need to properly size Steelhead deployments, including interface bandwidth, utilization and number of connections.
With an emphasis on learned behaviors, Cascade 8.3 is built to help customers look at historical application performance data and highlight any abnormal service variances. This capability can help users identify trends in outlying traffic and associate newly reported problems with traffic anomalies, Riverbed says.
“To meet our customers’ needs we’ve focused on automating features that were previously manually intensive and required detailed knowledge of the WAN environment,” Saldich said. “Our joint Cascade and Steelhead appliance customers can now streamline the reporting and analysis of their WAN-optimized environments.”
Cascade 8.3 is available now. Cascade appliances can operate as stand-alone gear or interoperate with Steelhead appliances.
