Announcing RiOS 7.0: Steelhead's new new best friend - Cascade Pilot

It’s common knowledge that pilot fish and sharks have a symbiotic relationship. Pilot fish follow sharks on their oceanic wanderings, cleaning them of parasites and feeding off their leftovers.

The new RiOS 7.0 release adds Embedded Cascade Shark functionality into Steelhead xx50 appliances running RiOS 7.0. Steelhead products have always had the ability to perform on-demand packet captures using the built-in tcpdump feature, but now the Embedded Cascade Shark feature lets you manage and analyze trace files directly on remote Steelhead devices using the Cascade Pilot packet analysis console.

The significance of this is three-fold:

First, it’s extremely cost effective. It means that when you are experiencing WAN trouble at a remote branch office without on-site IT staff, you don’t have to fly a technician or equipment to the site to troubleshoot the problem. You simply log onto Cascade Pilot’s web interface and remotely enable, schedule and manage your packet capture jobs and analyze your problems away – assuming you have the proper permission, of course.

Oh yeah, it’s a lot cheaper since Embedded Shark Functionality is included at no extra charge with Steelhead xx50 appliances! This means you don’t need to install dedicated hardware probes all over the network and you also avoid having to worry about all the extra wiring, cooling and power requirements and costs that would entail.

Secondly, it’s faster. Most likely, you will have diagnosed the problem, resolved the issue, and moved onto another more strategic project in the time it would take a technician to simply get through airport security!

Thirdly, it’s better for your network health.  Since Cascade Pilot analyzes trace files directly on the remote Steelhead appliance, you no longer have to move large files over the network, potentially making an already bad situation worse.

Cascade Pilot lets you quickly open multi-terabyte capture files and easily analyze them using its intuitive, graphical user interface. It helps find the traffic you want fast (seriously, really fast) using an extensive collection of easy-to-use network analysis views. Then, and only then, when you’ve narrowed the scope of the problem to the essential packets, with one click you can send only those packets over the network to Wireshark, the leading open source protocol analyzer, for decoding.

So my advice to any Steelhead customer is that even if you don’t use the complete Cascade solution, make sure you purchase at least one copy of Cascade Pilot to take advantage of the rich troubleshooting information you can glean from your Steelhead appliances. Click here to sign up for your FREE 30-day trail of Cascade Pilot.

For more information on Embedded Cascade Shark, check out this informative video interview with Dimitri Vlachos, senior director of marketing for Cascade.