The Riverbed Blog

Riverbed announces Cascade 9.5

Today, Riverbed announced Cascade 9.5 and Virtual Cascade Shark, which will provide customers with the needed visibility into load-balanced and virtualized data centers, and extend end-to-end performance monitoring and troubleshooting deeper into the data center. Other key new capabilities with Cascade 9.5 include multi-segment analysis, precision timestamp support, and VoIP quality reporting – all adding to deeper visibility for more accurate analysis and troubleshooting for delivering performance. 

Press release is here and below is a podcast discussion covering the 9.5 update.

 

 

 

Join Riverbed at AFCEA West 2012

We're making a presence at the first Federal show of the year, the West 2012 conference, which will take place January 24-26 at the San Diego Conference Center in San Diego, California. Visit the Riverbed booth (#1910) to learn about our IT performance solutions, which help defense organizations meet government mandates – to consolidate data centers, reduce costs for IT, and execute on the cloud first policy – without compromising performance.

West 2012 is co-sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute, and is the largest defense technology event on the U.S. west coast for communications, electronics, intelligence, information systems and imaging. The theme of this year’s West 2012 conference is “America’s Military at the Crossroads: What’s Out and What’s In for 2012 and Beyond?” Defense and industry leaders will discuss and debate the technologies and approaches for successful military programs this year.

For more information on the West 2012 event, visit: http://www.afcea.org/events/west/12/introduction.asp.

 

Technical Overview of Riverbed's Cascade

I have been getting a lot of questions recently from folks interested in learning more about the technical details of Riverbed's Cascade family of network performance management products.  Hopefully this blog post will answer many of those questions.

Cascade is an enterprise-wide network performance management solution, providing visibility into all your data centers, offices, and mobile users. It uses network flow data, supplemented with packet-based performance metrics, to discover applications, network dependencies, and monitor performance. It uses advanced behavioral analytics to track performance over time and alert you to any deviations from normal behavior. That way you can resolve problems before end-users are impacted.

Below is a look at the Cascade architecture.

 

Cascade consists of the following components:

Cascade Profiler

Provides centralized reporting and analysis of the data collected by other Cascade appliances (i.e., Gateway, Sensor, and Shark) and Steelhead products on a single user interface. It offers performance analytics, security analytics and proactive alerts for delivering application-aware monitoring and troubleshooting for your network. It combines all network data into a single data set with in-depth views that support flexible analysis of the information.

Cascade Gateway

Collects flow data from routers, switches and other network devices. It supports all standard flow types (NetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow, IPFIX, etc.). Cascade Gateway also collects Riverbed’s proprietary CascadeFlow, which is an enhanced version of NetFlow. CascadeFlow is exported by Steelhead appliances, and lets Cascade understand which interface(s) are WAN vs. LAN connected, identifies TCP retransmission counts, and determines the network round trip time for connections being optimized by Steelhead.For processed flow data destined for Cascade Profiler, Cascade Gateway aggregates, compresses, and encrypts the flow data, and then sends it to Cascade Profiler through Riverbed’s multi-purpose network management protocol (MNMP) on port TCP/41017. Cascade Gateway can transmit processed flow data to up to five Cascade Profiler or Cascade Express appliances in addition to sending the flow data it receives in an unprocessed manner to up to five other third-party devices. It can be deployed in the same location as the Profiler or regionally if topography requires.

Cascade Sensor

Passively inspects packets from SPAN ports or taps. It provides Layer 7 application classification and sends performance information, including end user experience metrics, to Cascade Profiler via Riverbed’s multi-purpose network management protocol (MNMP). It is typically deployed in data centers. A virtual edition, Sensor-VE, can be deployed as a Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) package on Steelhead appliances. Sensor-VE provides cost-effective visibility into branch office usage. It provides of many of the same capabilities of the Sensor appliance, with the exception of Layer 7 application classification.

Cascade Shark

Is a high-performance (1 GbE or 10 GbE) continuous packet capture, storage and analysis appliance. It is used for fast indexing and storage of multi-terabyte network traffic recordings so that a record of the traffic is available for retrospective analysis. Cascade Shark also provides micro-flow metrics to Cascade Profiler through MNMP. Micro-flow metrics enable the seamless integration from flow-level data to packet-level dataCascade Pilot seamlessly and securely integrates with remote Cascade Shark appliances to deliver a complete and feature-rich distributed network analysis solution.

Cascade Pilot

Is the only tool on the market to be fully integrated with Wireshark, the world’s most popular open source network protocol analyzer. While Cascade Profiler can provide visibility to all flows across the network, Cascade Pilot provides an in-depth view into problems requiring deep packet analysis. Cascade Pilot uses Riverbed’s unique XML-based protocol on top of an HTTPS connection to communicate with Cascade Shark.

Riverbed at Akamai Government Forum; Steve Riley to Present on Hybrid Cloud

With initiatives, mandates and reforms in place aimed at bringing efficiencies to government IT, it should be no surprise that over the last few months you’ve seen a lot of Riverbed at government IT conferences and events. After all, our IT performance solutions help government agencies meet initiatives, mandates and reforms – from enabling data center consolidation, to helping reduce costs for IT, and executing on the cloud first policy.

On November 16, Riverbed will be at the Akamai Government Forum, taking place at the Grand Hyatt Washington in Washington, D.C. The second annual Akamai Government Forum will focus on the latest solutions for scaling the Internet infrastructure for local, state and federal government agencies. Visit the Riverbed station to see demos and learn about our cloud performance solutions, including Steelhead WAN optimization, Stingray application delivery and Web content optimization, Cascade application-aware network performance management for traffic visibility, and Whitewater cloud storage gateways for data protection.

And, because you can’t get enough of him, Riverbed technical leader, cloud expert and aficionado Steve Riley will deliver the cloud track discussion on hybrid cloud from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. ET.

In his presentation, Steve will highlight how the performance problems associated with distance computing can be mitigated with optimization techniques designed for multiple layers: application, transport, network and storage.

Here is the teaser:

No longer just the fluff of airplane magazine articles, cloud computing is here to stay. The architectures envisioned for large public cloud providers are revolutionizing on-premises data centers, too. Hybrid clouds – clouds that utilize both public and private resources – allow agencies to spread workloads across multiple locations to satisfy distinct policy, regulatory, security and financial requirements. Hybrid clouds, like their individual counterparts, involve adding distance between users and their data. In most cases, the particular distance at any point in time is unpredictable, which will lead to inconsistent user experiences. Applications deployed in hybrid clouds often move large amounts of data across multiple internal and external providers; long waits for data transfer will affect productivity and availability.

Stop by; learn everything you need to know about optimization, acceleration and performance to meet the government IT mandates; and tell us what you thought of the conference.

 

Riverbed Customer Video - Energy Future Holdings

Michael Taccino, VP of IT & Infrastructure, Energy Future Holdings shares his experience with Riverbed's Steelhead WAN optimization and Cascade visibility products.

 

Optimizing Your Global Infrastructure for SharePoint – Part 1

SharePoint is an amazingly rich and robust solution that has taken off like a rocket.  However, SharePoint’s performance isn’t always perceived as rocket fast by remote users.  Many times organizations forget not everyone is at HQ sitting around the corner from the SharePoint servers…where they have virtually unlimited bandwidth and only 1 – 2 milliseconds of latency.  In most global organizations employees are at remote sites far away from the SharePoint servers…where they have limited bandwidth and much higher latency.  This limited bandwidth and higher latency correlates to a slower user experience and subsequently lower productivity.

In this multi-part blog post we will discuss how your organization can optimize your infrastructure to ensure your employees get a very fast SharePoint experience – no matter where they are.

One of the first tasks most large global organizations will want to undertake is understanding how their SharePoint environment overlays the infrastructure.  Cascade’s dependency mapping, performance monitoring, multi-tier service maps, transaction analysis and other capabilities empower organizations to better understand, consolidate, support and troubleshoot global SharePoint environments.  For example it can help answer questions such as:

• Where are my SharePoint Servers? > Are any of them unauthorized, or at remote sites and need to be consolidated?
• Which sites/users connect to which servers? > How fast is their experience? > Which users are the most disadvantaged?
• How many of my SharePoint users connect from the Internet/VPN versus internally?
• How many objects make up specific web pages? > Which objects are the largest/slowest? > How much delay is on the server versus the network?
• What backend servers do my SharePoint web servers connect to and depend upon?
• Are the SharePoint/IIS servers authenticating to a local Domain Controller for all users, or are they unexpectedly hitting a remote Domain Controller for some users?
• How much bandwidth does my crawling of regional SharePoint sites consume? > Is it impacting business applications?
• How much backup traffic does SharePoint generate?  Which path does it take to the DR/COOP Site?

Now that we understand SharePoint globally it is time to start strategizing how to improve performance.  There are several ways to approach this and priorities will depend on your organization’s goals.  In this series we’ll take the approach that user productivity and application availability take priority over infrastructure optimization. 

The fastest and easiest way to optimize general user experience and productivity within SharePoint is to optimize the content being served up.  To accomplish this Stingray Aptimizer, formerly Aptimize, has consistently been found by SharePoint administrators to be the solution of choice. It makes web pages pages 30 – 75% faster, increases server throughput, and takes only a few hours to fully configure and start improving performance.  Plus you can kick the tires for free prior to making a decision. 

Stingray Aptimizer is loaded on the SharePoint web server as a Runtime Page Optimizer (RPO). 
It improves performance by file merging, dynamic layout, compression, caching and more so that users see the page significantly faster. This results in fewer objects, fewer authentication turns, more use of the browser’s cache, lower network utilization and less load on the server infrastructure.  It has a huge impact on productivity and encourages users to engage SharePoint even more.  For third-party validation read about how Microsoft uses Stingray Aptimizer on their own SharePoint site.  

For the uber-geek here are live reports from www.webpagetest.org so you can compare optimized and non-optimized performance of Microsoft's SharePoint site.

Homepage 

    Aptimizer enabled: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111028_P8_20Q3G/

    Aptimizer disabled: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111028_16_20Q6X/

Customer page 

    Aptimizer enabled: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111028_KC_20QM5/

    Aptimizer disabled: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111028_ZR_20Q3E/

If you’re a visual person here are two great videos about Stingray Aptimizer:

1)    How It Works

2)    How to Install, Configure & Deploy

Wondering how much faster your SharePoint could be?  What are you waiting for? Give Stingray Aptimizer a try for free today.

In the next post of this series we’ll discuss how Stingray Traffic Manager and Application Firewall intelligently load balance, scale and protect global SharePoint environments.

 

Riverbed 101 - An introduction video to Riverbed's products

Bob Gilbert gives a high level overview of Riverbed's products.

 

 

Riverbed in Washington, D.C. at AWS Gov Cloud Summit II; Steve Riley to Speak on Cloud Implementation

Riverbed will demonstrate its cloud performance solutions at AWS Gov Cloud Summit II, taking place October 18 at the Washington Marriott Metro Center in Washington, D.C. Amazon's AWS Gov Cloud Summitt II will provide government IT leaders and agency executives with the information to succeed in their cloud computing projects. Attendees can visit the Riverbed station to learn about the company’s cloud performance solutions, which help government agencies meet mandates to consolidate data centers, reduce costs for IT, and execute on the cloud first policy. In addition, Riverbed technical leader Steve Riley will lead a discussion on cloud implementation.

Conference attendees can visit the Riverbed station to learn about how the company’s application-aware network performance management (NPM) and wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions that are critical elements for providing network visibility and control that enable the migration, and accelerates the transmission of applications and data, to cloud environments. 

Conference attendees can also learn more about cloud performance and cloud implementation in a panel session with Steve Riley.

What: Cloud Implementation Panel

Who: Steve Riley, technical leader, Riverbed

When: Tuesday, October 18, 4:15 PM  – 5:00 PM

Where: Solutions Breakout area

 

 

What impresses me most about Cascade…

As a new Riverbed employee (just finished my third month) who previously worked at a Cascade competitor, I have to say I’m really impressed with Cascade, the application-aware network performance management product from Riverbed. It provides some unique features, like automated discovery and dependency mapping, as well as an elegant and simple design the makes it easy to deploy and use. It’s also very flexible. The feedback I’ve heard from Cascade users supports my opinions, and they typically add that it has helped them significantly reduce the time to diagnose and troubleshoot network performance and security issues. In fact, Cascade reduces MTTR (mean time to resolution) by an average of 83%, according to IDC. Making something as complex as Cascade look easy but still provide depth and flexibility is no mean feat and is definitely a feather in the cap of our engineering team.

Here are some of the things I love about Cascade – the features and capabilities that make it easy to use and which also set it apart from other solutions:

• Discovery and dependency mapping – My absolute favorite feature is discovery and dependency mapping (DDM). DDM automates the process of mapping transactions and applications and their interdependencies to the underlying infrastructure. It is an essential component of the Cascade solution because so many other features use the service models it creates to provide richer information. For example, service models become the basis of the Cascade service dashboards, and service maps provide location awareness to speed troubleshooting and are also invaluable tools for planning and validating IT change, such as data center consolidations.

• Service dashboards – Cascade’s service dashboards provide a quick view into the end-to-end health of an application or service. Application services are created using a wizard that automates the discovery process. It identifies the users, web servers, application servers, databases, authentication and DNS servers, etc. that make up today’s common applications. Because the discovery process is automated (unlike our competitors who must manually define service components), it means that service definitions are detailed, accurate and easy to keep up to date. Red-yellow-green health status indicators are driven by Cascade Profiler’s advanced analytics which automatically detect and alert on meaningful changes in performance, providing proactive notification of emerging issues.

• Automated analytics – Cascade’s advanced behavioral analytics are both mature and feature rich. I know analytics have gotten a bit of a bad name in competing products, but Cascade analytics have been stable since day one and they really work. Cascade Profiler track dozens of performance and security metrics, building and updating historical baselines and alerting upon meaningful changes in behavior. Cascade analytics give IT staff the warning they need to identify and fix problems before users even notice them.

• Distributed packet capture / centralized analysis – Cascade Shark appliances can be distributed throughout the network; they should be placed wherever continuous packet capture and storage is needed. While competitive products often require export of large trace files across the network for local packet analysis – often slowing network performance even further – Cascade Pilot analyzes trace files directly on remote Cascade Shark appliances, refining the data to send only the specific packets of interest to Wireshark for decoding. Distributed packet capture / centralized analysis means that when the network is experiencing issues, Cascade is not part of the problem!

• Integrated Packet/Flow (iP/F) – Cascade is the only network performance management solution to combine flow data and packet data into a single logical record. iP/F is the secret sauce that enables broad visibility with minimal instrumentation as well as facilitates the seamless transition between flow-based information in Cascade Profiler and packet-level information in Cascade Shark. The advantage of this architecture is that it provides greater visibility and management at a significantly lower cost, and it reduces the time it takes to identify, diagnose and resolve complex performance issues.

• Wireshark integration – Everybody loves Wireshark. In fact, Wireshark is downloaded more than 500,000 times a month. Tight integration and seamless hand off from Cascade Pilot to Wireshark takes advantage of the network staff’s expertise with Wireshark and further simplifies and streamlines troubleshooting. Why ask your network managers to use anything other than Wireshark, the tool they know and love?

• Steelhead WAN optimization analysis – Of course being a Riverbed product means that Cascade has to play nice with Steelhead appliances. Cascade does that in a variety of ways: it provides a deep understanding of utilization and performance; it enables you to reconstruct response time and normalize it across optimized and non-optimized environments; and it automatically identifies and alerts on changes in the experience of remote users. In addition, you can use Steelhead appliances to provide cost-effective visibility into branch LAN performance without have to add expensive probes. Cascade and Steelhead provide a one-two punch against WAN performance issues!

So, I’ve told you what I like about Cascade, now it’s your turn…What’s your favorite Cascade feature? Tell us your thoughts about Cascade and what role it has played in helping manage your network and application performance.

Video: Introduction to Riverbed Cascade Pilot and Cascade Shark

Betty DuBois recently recorded this nice video that provides an introduction to Riverbed's packet capture and analysis products.

 

 

The Secret Connection between Vacuum Cleaners and Riverbed Cascade

Those of you who remember the browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape in the 1990's may remember that browsers always seemed to be named after SUV's (think Ford Explorer and Lincoln Navigator). If you use Riverbed Cascade, you might be wondering what its components are named after. I think I found the answer: vacuum cleaners!

Let's start with Shark - I noticed this one in a store a few days ago:

 

As every Cascade customer knows, Shark is not complete without Pilot.

The next one reminds me of Cascade Profiler - did we just forget the letter r?

No issues with the next one - Sensor is simply Sensor. I took this picture at a hotel recently.

 
 
 

And finally... a vacuum cleaner that represents the entire product line:

 

So there you have it... Next time you want to suck all the performance problems out of your network, look at the nearest vacuum cleaner for inspiration!

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - Happy Birthday United States of America

The 4^th of July, The Glorious Fourth,  Independence Day or the birthday of the United States of America  are all names that are used to recognize the day the declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress. This day marked the legal separation of the 13 colonies from Great Britain and opened new opportunities for the people of the United States to have certain unalienable rights.

 Second sentence from the Declaration of Independence states “ We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that amongst these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

 Much like the 13 colonies that declared their independence in July 4, 1776, knowledge workers should also have unalienable rights including the liberty to access data anywhere, any time without having to deal with bandwidth and latency issues which we would all agree, if not addressed, would dampen our pursuit of happiness!

 So in tribute to the 4^th let me suggest 4 ways to gain independence and performance happiness.

 1.       Know your applications and make sure to choose a WAN optimization vendor that can give you application specific acceleration.  Riverbed prides ourselves in supporting the broadest range of layer-7 application-specific optimizations of any WAN optimization vendor.  Chances are that we can improve the performance of the applications you are running

2.       Make sure that your choice supports all environments - data center, branch office, mobile workers, VDI, private cloud, public cloud, etc.  Riverbed offers WAN optimization technology that delivers best-of-breed performance for all environments eliminating the need to have different vendor interfaces, integration, and performance standards.

3.       Know where your performance issues are and have the right tools to quickly drill down to the root cause.  Riverbed’s application-aware Network Performance Management (NPM) integrated architecture gives customers robust real-time network and application performance analytics, resulting in complete top-down visibility into their network and applications. Cascade is the only NPM solution on the market that fully consolidates real-time business-level performance views with packet-level analysis all in a single data set that users can seamlessly navigate in order to quickly and accurately diagnose and troubleshoot network and application performance problems.

4.       Chose a vendor that has industry leading support. In April of this year Riverbed was recognized and certified by J.D. Power and Associates and TSIA for excellence in Global Customer Service and Support. These certifications acknowledge excellence in delivering outstanding service and support on a worldwide basis to Riverbed customers. Riverbed is one of a select few companies to receive this distinction for global certification under both the J.D. Power and Associates CTSS and the TSIA Excellence in Service Operations program in the same year.

 Typical 4^th of July tradition is to celebrate by hosting a barbeque, watching fireworks or by decorating in the colors of the American flag – red, white, and blue. For our Riverbed customer’s we encourage you to celebrate your performance independence by celebrating in the spirit of the 4^th.

 So whether you enjoy a nice steak and Steelhead, have some Cascade and cocktails, or decide to parade the streets decorated in Riverbed orange, we wish you a very happy Independence day!

Old Westbury Solves network performance problems with Riverbed Cascade

A Riverbed customer was recently spotlighted in SearchCIO.  This is a nice example that demonstrates how important the role of behavioral analytics is to a network monitoring solution.

The following customer quote describes one of the ways that Westbury uses the advanced analytics capability of Riverbed Cascade to proactively solve network performance problems.

 "You can actually feed data back into Riverbed's Cascade and let it run on autopilot, so that it can build up its own behavioral analysis. Someone uses their own environment Monday through Friday, 9-5, and then suddenly their machine turns on and is being used on a Sunday afternoon. Now it's possible that they're just catching up on work, but it's also possible that it's been hijacked. The system will flag that, and the human can follow up with that."

For more information about Riverbed's Cascade product, please visit http://www.riverbed.com/us/products/cascade/index.php

Upgrading Performance From Good to Great

As a sales engineer, clients commonly ask me ‘what else could we do to improve application performance over the WAN?’ I normally respond with something like, “Keeping the network available and using WAN acceleration to make applications faster provides good performance. However, integrated application-layer Quality of Service (QoS) and robust performance visibility provides GREAT performance.”  QoS enables predictable performance over the WAN. Robust performance visibility provides the ability to efficiently solve problems.  If you want a worry-free WAN, in which business applications run well even under the heaviest utilization loads, then today’s blog post is for you.

Earlier this year, RiOS 6.5 was released with a major QoS overhaul.  This included application-layer classification via AppFlow; basic/advanced modes with robust traffic shaping improvements; and workflow improvements to save tons of time. If you want to ensure your precious WAN resources are mapped to strategic priorities, then RiOS 6.5 is your new best friend. With it customers can easily control tricky recreational applications, enterprise port hopping applications like Microsoft Exchange/Outlook’s RPC, and UDP-based Voice/Video.  This is a huge benefit for triple-play networks where balancing the simultaneous demand of voice, video, and data can be daunting. While QoS isn’t sexy, it enables customers to ensure performance when the WAN is most heavily utilized…instead of getting a call complaining about application problems just as they’re sitting down for dinner with the family. 

While customers could use router-based QoS, they’ll find deploying WAN Acceleration and QoS in two different devices is less than ideal. Application-layer classification is critical in today’s networks where many applications tunnel over HTTP or port hop (Outlook/Exchange, VoIP, etc). Applying application layer QoS is the biggest challenge for enterprises since the WAN Accelerator obscures OSI Layers 5 - 7 (the application signatures) from the router. If you want application layer classification then moving QoS to the Steelhead is the best option. The Steelhead can see all the application signatures prior to optimization and apply the most appropriate QoS level. If the WAN supports Classes of Service then the Steelhead can also intelligently mark DiffServ bits, so an application’s packets are treated accordingly across the whole network. This enables an application-aware end-to-end QoS  architecture. To learn how to configure the new QoS features in RiOS 6.5 refer to Chapter 3 of the RiOS 6.5 Riverbed Deployment Guide and Chapter 7 of the Steelhead Management Console User Guide.

 
With the acquisitions of Mazu and CACE Technologies Riverbed gained several unique visibility solutions…Cascade Profiler, Pilot, and Shark. The rapid integration of these solutions with Steelheads has delivered a formidable and cost-effective performance analysis toolset that tightly integrates with WAN optimization as a whole. Steelheads have long supported NetFlow export and tcpdump for packet captures. With Steelhead’s adoption of cascade-flow export, organizations can migrate from a basic utilization-focused view with Netflow to cascade-flow’s performance-centric view. This enables streamlined monitoring/troubleshooting for applications, sites, networks and users. The customers I’ve had deploy Cascade absolutely love the service dashboards, Active Directory user tracking integration, and true application-layer visibility. When they first migrate from the port and IP address visibility of NetFlow to the application visibility of Cascade they are amazed at what applications are really on their networks.

If they layer on Pilot and Shark they get high-speed packet capture, transaction visualizations, and packet analysis to quickly find the root cause of problems. Riverbed has a long tradition helping customers set new IT speed records, and we’ve just done it again with the addition of Cascade Profiler’s right-click integration with Pilot/Shark. Customers now can drill-down from reports in Cascade Profiler to the transaction and packet visualizations in Pilot all in the same workflow.  If they need to go even deeper they just right-click and open only the packets they desire in Wireshark where they can see the exact bit and bytes. My customers have been particularly impressed with Pilot's ability to efficiently find and analyze VoIP call problems. Finding and analyzing performance problems has never been easier.  To see videos of  Pilot in action go here.

At the end of day, if an organization can’t proactively solve network, application and user performance challenges then they won’t have great performance. When WAN optimization is deployed across an enterprise proper planning and execution to ensure the IT staff has the right visibility into the right data is worth the effort.  With Steelheads at remote sites integrated with Cascade at the datacenter customers now have enterprise-wide visibility to efficiently find and analyze performance challenges.

Don’t settle for good performance, upgrade to great performance today.

Riverbed announces RiOS 6.5 and Cascade 9.0

Earlier today, Riverbed released updates to our RiOS and Cascade products.  You can find the press release here. 

RiOS is the Riverbed Optimization System.  I think of it as the Operating System that runs Steelhead Appliances.  But this time around, I want to talk about Cascade and its major improvements first.

With this release of Cascade, Riverbed will provide a wide range of functionality that can discover the critical services on your network, prioritize critical traffic with advanced, built-in QoS capabilities, and monitor performance of your applications with easy-to-use, executive-level dashboards, all while reducing your hardware and software costs. This helps to extend visibility from the network engineer all the way to the C-suite, and the ability for IT to control and allocate resources based on the business needs of enterprises.

Riverbed Cascade® 9.0 delivers a set of service dashboards that report on application and network status in an easy-to-use format, so you can see how the network is delivering your critical applications. With Cascade dashboards and reports, you can finally answer business and technical questions about your network around what are the performance problems, where did they occur in the service delivery path, identify the root cause, fix it and ensure that your service-level objectives are met.

Some of the new features in Cascade 9.0 are,

• Executive-level Dashboards
• SLA Reporting
• N-tier Application Discovery Wizard

Executive-level Dashboards are designed to give a C-level person an easy way to quickly see the status of all of his managed networks.  When you see a red circle, as in the example to the left, you can drill down and see what the source of the problem is (as is shown under San Francisco).  Cascade 9.0 enables network managers to drill down further, and identify the source of the problem.  You can find exactly where the problem occurs in the delivery path, based on discovery and dependency mapping. 

And unlike competitive products, you can navigate between apps, servers, and users to really identify and solve the problem.  You are not limited just to packets.  You can find how long the problem has existed, whether or not it's getting worse, and even identify the root cause.

The Service Performance Report (right) gives users and administrators a high-level summary view of what's going on across the network.  We've also added QoS reporting per application and network segment, along with real-time monitoring and historical analysis.

These QoS-centric features increase the gap between Riverbed's offerings and our competition.

The new release of RiOS 6.5 adds some major new features as well.  One is the new Riverbed AppFlow Classification engine.  Essentially, it will give users the ability to classify network traffic by the application that sends it.  RiOS will ship with the ability to recognize the most popular and commonly found applications, and users will have the ability to add their own apps, even custom ones. 

And then once the apps have been identified, you'll be able to schedule or prioritize them by QoS levels, and QoS will also be smart enough to take into account applications' latency requirements and sensitivity. 

We're also adding improvements to satellite optimizations, client side SSL certificate support, and support for IPv6, and several industry firsts:

• Native Optimizations for SMB v2 traffic
• Full-spectrum Optimization for Outlook Anywhere
• End-to-end Client server signing of traffic
• Selective Optimizations for SRDF

As always, Riverbed customers with support contracts can get these upgrades for no additional charge.  Watch for other blog entries today with demos and information about these important releases.

Riverbed Connect Podcast - RiOS 6.5 and Cascade 9.0

Bob Gilbert and Vikram Ramesh discuss the 6.5 update to RiOS, the software that powers Riverbed's WAN optimization products.  Also discussed is Cascade 9.0, which is a major update to Riverbed's solution for providing visibility into network and application performance.

 

 

Riverbed Think Fast Demo - Cascade 9.0

Cascade 9.0 Demo

 

Riverbed Think Fast Demo - Advanced QoS Engine

RiOS 6.5 and the Advanced QoS Engine

 

Riverbed can shed the "one trick pony" label

Riverbed's Steelhead WAN optimization appliance has been arguably one of the most successful IT infrastructure products since it started shipping in May 2004.  While the overwhelming market success of Steelhead is undeniable, many industry followers continued to wonder if Riverbed would be able to expand our market reach beyond our core WAN optimization competency.

My initial response to the industry followers is that if you are going to have a single product and market focus, what better market to focus on than the WAN optimization market?  Riverbed's Steelhead family of WAN optimization products has a profound impact on a variety of IT initiatives ranging from application performance to infrastructure consolidation to disaster recovery and business continuity.  Not only is there huge value with our WAN optimization products (ask our customers), there is also a large untapped market with future customers that have yet to deploy WAN optimization.  

That being said, I am happy to say that the last 2 years has seen Riverbed expand beyond our core Steelhead family of WAN optimization products.  The result is new technology, capabilities, and value for markets that extend beyond the core WAN optimization market.

The Jan 2009 acquisition of Mazu Networks, and ultimately the release of Cascade, was a clear signal that Riverbed was serious about expanding our solution set beyond core WAN optimization.  Cascade combines advanced analytics with a powerful drill-down capability to deliver an awesome solution for obtaining visibility into network and application performance.  With the recent acquisition of CACE technologies, we have rounded out our network monitoring solution set with the addition of a robust suite of packet capture, and analysis technology. 

The recent launch of Whitewater, our groundbreaking solution for optimizing cloud storage, is yet another example of how Riverbed continues to innovate in areas adjacent to the WAN optimization market.  Whitewater enables customers to leverage public cloud storage provider environments to perform data backup and recovery.

While I am excited about our new products and new market potential, I am also happy to say that we continue to focus on our foundation Steelhead WAN optimization family of products with innovative features and capabilities delivered with every major software update.  Keep your eyes open for an upcoming announcement on this front.

Can we finally shed the one trick pony label? 

 

Cascade Demo - Chapter 1: Jack's New Job

Jack is the manager of the network team and is confronted with application performance problem reports from his users. To find out how Jack delivers good, consistent application performance, watch the rest of the demo here

 

Network and Application Visibility with Cascade

Dinko Zidarich demonstrates Cascade, Riverbed's solution for providing visibility of both network and application performance