Riverbed upgrades network management options for service providers

Riverbed is giving an all-boost to its Cascade family of network performance management solutions for customers at the SMB level up to the enterprise.

At the heart of today's announcements is Cascade 10.0, which has been upgraded to manage issues across "the entire virtualization spectrum," which Riverbed defined as from the virtual desktop, to server virtualization, to the fully virtualized data center using software-defined networking.

Dimitri Vlachos, senior director of marketing and products within the Cascade business unit at Riverbed, explained via telephone last week that "virtualization is really affecting more and more parts of IT infrastructure."

Adding that while it brings value, flexibility, data protection, and cost savings to businesses, Vlachos warned that virtualization also entails a lot of challenges for managing network performance.

Thus, touted as the "only" application-aware platform span this spectrum, Cascade 10.0 is supposed to offered a detailed look into the performance of virtualized environments.

In turn, this should enable managed service providers to offer performance management to their customers anywhere, regardless of their existing infrastructures and cloud environments.

“We see a lot of customers using much older performance technology and can’t get a viewpoint of applications of their network,” Vlachos remarked. “Today that’s not enough. You have to understand the network is there to deliver applications. They're intertwined: applications and network performance.”

Vlachos highlighted support for VMware's VXLAN software-defined networks, in particular. This includes specific management and troubleshooting tools for managing both software-defined data centers and physical networks within a single solution.

Furthermore, Riverbed is introducing a few new ways for managed service providers to deliver network performance management to business customers. Here's how this works:

• Cascade Profiler Virtual Edition: Installed as a virtual machine, Profiler acts as a central reporting console that displays application and network data from the existing Cascade Shark Virtual Edition appliance and new Cascade Gateway Virtual Edition to provide company-wide and service-level monitoring.
• Cascade Gateway Virtual Edition: Collects and aggregates data and statistics from network infrastructures and virtual environments for delivery to the Cascade Profiler Virtual Edition virtual machine.

Riverbed's Cascade product suite can also now be purchased as a single, comprehensive unit that can be deployed by service providers across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.

Cascade 10.0 and the new Cascade virtual edition products are expected to roll out before the end of the year.

For a closer look at the 10.0 update to Cascade, check out the video podcast below:

Image via Riverbed