Flughafen Zuerich Deploys Riverbed

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced that
Flughafen Zuerich AG, a private company that operates Zuerich Airport in
Switzerland, deployed Riverbed Cascade Shark and Cascade Pilot to improve
network monitoring, configuration, and troubleshooting across 150 national and
international networks.

With Riverbed network management solutions, Flughafen Zuerich was
able to improve employee productivity and enhance customer service by reducing
troubleshooting time from hours to minutes.

The Zuerich Airport
serves more than 24 million passengers annually.

To operate the airport,
Flughafen Zuerich works with more than 270 partners, including nearly 90
domestic and international airlines as well as retailers, hotels, and
restaurants. All of these partners have their own WANs that connect to and rely
on the airport LAN for accessing their mission critical applications
such as bookings, reservations, and check-in.

As a result, the airport
LAN connects to approximately 150 national and international networks and has
more than 14,000 connection points.

With such a complex
network, network engineers at Flughafen Zuerich were spending time
trying to get to the root of application and server issues. While Flughafen
Zuerich used Wireshark network protocol analyzer to capture traffic data, they
still needed a solution that could simplify network configuration and
monitoring, while providing the tools to rapidly troubleshoot problems.

"Given the complexity of our infrastructure,
previously, if problems arose, a network engineer had to walk around the
airport with test equipment to set-up traces at hot spots, such as a data
center," said Stefan Thoma, senior network engineer at Flughafen
Zuerich. "Other engineers may
have been working on the same problem in other parts of the airport, and the
customer’s own engineering staff could be coordinating with us from another
continent, which could take up hours of our time. We needed a solution that was
faster and more efficient."

Flughafen Zuerich deployed Cascade Shark appliances at three key points,
including two datacenters and an airport exchange where all networks are routed
and firewalled. With the possibility of multi-segment analysis, it is able to see that network traffic data and the routing is
asymmetric. This has simplified analysis for the airport.
Cascade Pilot offered network analysis as well as tight integration with
Wireshark for isolating the specific packets needed to diagnose and
troubleshoot complex performance issues.

Software troubleshooting
can now be resolved in minutes by a single employee in the data center through an
easy-to-use GUI, enhancing IT productivity and the user
experience. In addition, because the company no longer needs several people to
collect and analyze data, Flughafen Zuerich is able to deploy its engineers
more efficiently and take advantage of real-time information and historical
data to help resolve network issues before they affect application performance.

"Today, we no longer have to walk around the
airport with test equipment, and with Cascade Pilot, we can see the source of
problems immediately and address them. It’s critical that our network runs
smoothly and efficiently, and Riverbed helps it to do just that by enabling us
to save time, increase our network team’s productivity, and enhance customer
service," concludes Thoma.

Cascade is an
application-aware network performance management (NPM) solution that provides
IT operations the performance information they need to find and
fix network and application problems. The integration between Cascade Shark
appliance, Cascade Pilot software, and Wireshark software provides a powerful,
efficient, and cost-effective solution for troubleshooting complex or
intermittent performance and security-related problems.

Shark appliance
delivers scalable, high-performance packet capture, rapid indexing, and
long-term storage to enable network troubleshooting, back-in-time forensic
analysis and reporting of network and security events across physical and
virtual environments.

Cascade Pilot software
is a network analysis and reporting solution that provides users with an easy-to-read
GUI, which allows them to analyze multi-terabyte packet recordings on
remote Cascade Shark appliances without having to transfer large packet
captures files across the network.

Wireshark software is a network protocol analyzer for deep packet inspection and
decoding.