Riverbed Provides Out-of-the-Box WAN Optimization Intelligence

Riverbed Technology introduced enhanced features to streamline the visibility and reporting efforts of organizations deploying WAN optimization. Since the completion of its acquisition of Mazu Networks in February 2009, Riverbed has integrated the visibility and analysis capabilities of Cascade appliances into its award-winning WAN optimization solutions. In the newest version, Cascade 8.3, Riverbed will provide ‘out-of-the-box’ WAN optimization intelligence, with an enhanced level of automation, ease-of-use, and consolidated enterprise visibility in one place.

As infrastructures become more complex, organizations are increasingly finding significant gaps in their ability to monitor the performance of critical applications and gain actionable information to drive the decision process. Without requiring any expensive remote probes, advance configuration or environmental knowledge, Cascade ‘out-of-the-box’ analyzes network traffic to provide valuable information about the performance, interactions of and dependencies between users, applications and networks. Cascade 8.3 will streamline operator efforts to gain insight into where bottlenecks are in the environment, reporting on both optimized and non-optimized traffic in a consolidated view.

"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. "Riverbed is now able to deliver to its enterprise and service provider customers faster, smarter and more efficient IT infrastructure performance solutions. The features available in Cascade 8.3 support our overall strategy to provide an end-to-end IT infrastructure performance solution."

The new features in Cascade 8.3 will provide customers with a comprehensive overview of their WAN environments.

Steelhead Appliance Auto-Detection
Cascade appliances will automatically detect Steelhead appliances. The automatic awareness of the Steelhead appliances will allow Cascade appliances to automatically group the WAN interfaces and associated NetFlow data as belonging to optimized sites or non-optimized sites as appropriate. This automatic detection and association simplifies Cascade setup, shortens the out-of-box time required to get up and running, and enables scaling in growing environments. The value of the Cascade appliance in an optimized environment is increased and the customer time-to-value is dramatically reduced when Cascade appliance WAN reports automatically reflect optimized versus non-optimized traffic.

One-Click WAN and Optimization Analysis Report
One-Click WAN reporting eliminates the need for prior operational or environmental knowledge previously necessary to secure high-level reports. With the enhanced reporting capabilities, it’s easier for a non-expert to access valuable reports about WAN optimization. Unlike alternative offerings, Cascade appliances will allow an IT director or C-level executive to obtain business-level insight into the service levels of network traffic without extensive product training, enabling smarter and faster decision-making that will positively impact operational efficiencies.

One-Click reporting capabilities include:

• Overall WAN Analysis: Customers can better and more easily understand which applications are being used most in the WAN, which sites are most active, where potential congestion lies, and which sites are potentially experiencing poor application performance.
• Optimization Candidate Analysis: Customers can better and more easily understand which sites and which applications would benefit most from the application of Steelhead appliances, allowing better management of current resources. Cascade visibility accelerates efforts to prioritize the most congested WAN links; understand the business importance of different links; document how congestion affects application performance; and understand which sites will benefit from the application of Steelhead appliances.
  Optimization Benefit Analysis: Customers can better and more easily understand how optimization is impacting the WAN, with visibility into which key applications and locations are benefiting from acceleration. The increased visibility allows customers to forecast the value and rationalize the investment of deploying additional Steelhead appliances by addressing key issues, such as which sites are benefiting, which applications are benefiting, and how much bandwidth is being saved.
• Site Capacity Analysis: Cascade provides the exact data necessary to properly size Steelhead appliances within a report detailing interface bandwidth, utilization and number of connections.

Enhanced Reporting on Learned Behaviors
Reporting analysis is the key component once an enterprise has true visibility into its WAN optimization environment. With competitive offerings, network managers are burdened with sifting through reams of reports to determine what is normal and what is outlying traffic.

To ease the strain experienced by network managers, Cascade appliances will automatically create baselines by learning the typical patterns of interactions between users, applications, servers and network segments as soon as they start to receive data. Enterprises are then able to leverage the rich data within Cascade appliances to better understand application adherence to service level objectives over time.

With Cascade 8.3, Riverbed is introducing enhanced behavioral reporting that enables customers to look back historically at application performance and have abnormal service variances automatically highlighted. This enhances an operator’s ability to identify trends in outlying traffic, associate newly reported problems with traffic anomalies, and separate them from normal service delivery cycles.

"The enhancements to the Cascade appliances address the need for an application- and business-aware management solution. To meet our customers’ needs we’ve focused on automating features that were previously manually intensive and required detailed knowledge of the WAN environment," added Saldich. "Our joint Cascade and Steelhead appliance customers can now streamline the reporting and analysis of their WAN-optimized environments."

Availability
Cascade version 8.3 will be available to customers beginning June 15, 2009. Cascade appliances can operate as a stand-alone solution or interoperate with Steelhead appliances.