Riverbed Cascade 'Shark Week' – top 10 shark facts – this won’t bite!

 

In honor of the upcoming Shark Week on Discovery Channel, here is our top ten list of favorite Shark facts from Glenn Brewer, VP Engineering, Riverbed Cascade. This is a list that would make David Letterman jealous! 

1) Sharks are highly efficient predators – A little known fact about (Cascade) Shark is that it can be configured to filter on just about any attribute of the incoming network traffic and only consume what is needed for later analysis. Compare this to other solutions that must consume everything and filter it later and you’ll see why the Shark is a more efficient predator!

2) Sharks are always alert to danger – Using powerful Watches in Cascade Pilot on live streaming network traffic, Sharks are always alert to danger.  Watches are the Shark’s truly powerful way to detect unexpected conditions before it becomes threatening!

3) Sharks are able to communicate – Another little known fact about the Shark is that they are able to communicate. One form of communication is exporting flow data to the Cascade Profiler. This allows a school of Sharks to efficiently share information even when they are physically separated. 

4) Sharks never sleep – With appliance models in a variety of form factors, disk sizes, and network interfaces, as well as cost effective virtual solutions, Sharks are always awake and monitoring your network.

5) Sharks can smell a drop of blood in a million drops of water – Like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack, the Shark can quickly and efficiently “swim” through millions of packets, right to the source of the problem and quickly find “a drop of blood.” The sort of speed and ease with which the Shark does this is unprecedented.

6) Sharks can see as well behind them as they can see in front – Sharks are capable of monitoring and analyzing incoming data as the information arrives. But they are also quite adept at looking behind to search for trends or find issues that have occurred in the past. This gives Shark a 360-degree view of the network!

7) Sharks come in wide variety of shapes and sizes – Shark appliances are available in 1U, 2U and 3U form factors with storage capacity up to 32 terabytes. The virtual Shark can run on any appliance that can support VMWare ESX and “mini-Shark” resides on many different Steelhead platforms.

8) Sharks and Pilot fish have a symbiotic relationship – Shark and Pilot team up and work cooperatively. In fact, the full value of Shark is only realized when Pilot is also around.

9) Sharks have an efficient metabolism – Sharks have multiple ways to intelligently conserve limited resources. Concurrenltly capturing jobs, pre-filtering network traffic to save only the relevant data, slicing packets to save as much or as little of the payload as is needed, and stopping capture jobs on a schedule or based on size are just some of the techniques that Sharks efficiently use scarce resources.

10) Sharks are at the top of the oceanic food chain – Do we need to say more??!!

We hope that is a pretty easy way to break down some analogies between real sharks and our own Cascade Sharks. If you would like to learn more about ways to streamline packet capture and to accelerate troubleshooting, all you have to do is check out Cascade Shark. We won’t bite!