Riverbed Enhances Network Performance Management Tools

Riverbed (RVBD) introduced two new virtual editions to the Riverbed Cascade product family, and advances its performance management solution to version 10.

The two new editions enable managed service providers (MSPs) to deliver application-aware network performance management (NPM) as a service to their small-to-medium-sized and enterprise customers. Virtual editions of the Cascade Profiler, Gateway,  and Cascade Shark  provide a completely virtualized NPM solution portfolio. Whether physical, partially virtualized, or fully virtualized environments, providers can provide performance management to customers, regardless of location.

"By leveraging server and network virtualization, cloud hosting and service providers are able to achieve multi-tenant services across a single physical infrastructure, but this creates new challenges for performance monitoring, where it is necessary to keep management data segregated by client and subscriber," said Jim Frey, managing research director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). "Application-aware network performance management solutions must be adapted for these new virtualized environments by themselves being deployed using a virtualized footprint, which Riverbed has made possible in the latest release of Cascade and virtual edition products. In this way, providers can assure services across the entire infrastructure while also being able to discretely monitor and share performance details on a customer-by-customer basis."

Cascade 10.0
A new version 10.0 of Cascade was also released, as a NPM solution to address network and application performance issues across virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI), server virtualization, and software-defined networks (SDNs).

Cascade 10.0 provides detailed monitoring into the performance of virtualized environments. The latest version of Cascade also provides performance monitoring of VXLAN SDNs by providing visibility into the UDP-encapsulated traffic and virtual tunnel endpoints.

"With the spread of private clouds and virtualization, providers have been pushing for more control over the network. Current software-defined network overlay technologies being introduced by virtualization technology providers have visibility gaps, which in turn causes visibility issues for network engineers responsible for application performance troubleshooting," said Jonah Kowall, research director at Gartner. "Current monitoring and management tools must be updated and improved to see not only the traffic but the relevant additional data presented within these overlay technologies."