Riverbed Offers Enhanced Cascade Soln For Network Assessment

Riverbed Technology, an IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, has announced enhancements to Cascade, its advanced network and application performance analysis and visibility solution. The newest version, Cascade 8.4 provides enhanced reporting and integration with Riverbed WAN optimisation that enables organisations to better assess, adapt and accelerate network performance.

With Cascade 8.4, Riverbed allows enterprises to proactively monitor the end-user application experience in real-time. In addition, Cascade 8.4 integrates with Riverbed Steelhead appliances to measure performance within optimised environments.

The new features in Cascade 8.4 allow organisations to measure beyond network performance and availability, and determine the business impact any drops in performance have on end-users. In addition, this release introduces Cascade Sensor-VE for the virtualised Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), enabling seamless performance measurement in both optimised and non-optimised environments - without requiring expensive physical probes in every branch office.

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Jon Oltsik, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, says, “By integrating Cascade into optimised environments, Riverbed provides a tool for higher level business analytics, visibility and reporting. This gives the technical staff the information and language needed to communicate with C-level executives when providing an understanding of the network and campaigning for IT dollars. Cascade 8.4 provides organisations with performance information they can act on – not only at a technical level but at a business level.”

Proactively Monitor End-User Experience

Enhanced Application Performance Metrics

New Cascade metrics go beyond measuring the performance and availability of the network infrastructure, and enable examination of the experience of application users. Using a set of performance metrics, Cascade 8.4 measures how fast users can conduct business.

• Application Throughput – This metric shows the rate at which application data is traversing the network, not including network overhead and retransmits. This feature helps assess the overall performance of the application and determine the need for additional optimisation.

• User Connection Throughput – This metric shows a key proxy for end-user experience. A per-connection throughput measurement, measured only while the connection is actively transmitting.

• Connection Duration – This metric is leveraged when examining the performance of transaction-oriented applications, where a connection contains a limited number of application transactions.

By automatically focusing on periods of actual user activity, Cascade measures the speed a user can achieve when performing application transactions – therefore, measuring the true experience of the end user. The end user metrics are gathered and sent to Cascade Profiler for analysis.

Behavioural Analytics

Unlike reactive alternatives, Cascade continuously tracks end-user performance metrics, learning the normal network and application behaviour, and proactively alerting the network and application teams whenever end users are experiencing slow performance. Cascade 8.4’s behavioural analytics enable the network team to solve problems even before end-users are impacted, and provide a measurement of the efficiency of the IT infrastructure.

Measure Performance in Optimised Environments

With the growing number of centralised, consolidated private cloud environments, enterprises are having an increasingly difficult time obtaining clear visibility into application performance at the branch office. With Cascade 8.4, Riverbed introduces Cascade Sensor-VE, a virtual remote sensor that runs on the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), a virtualised partition on the Steelhead appliance. Cascade Sensor-VE takes advantage of the established Steelhead appliance footprint to enable enhanced performance measurement in optimised environments. Cascade Sensor-VE is an optional software-only component that enhances Cascade’s flow-based analytics, which operate across optimised and non-optimised branch offices.

Cascade 8.4 and Cascade Sensor-VE are currently available.