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Overview
Managing a corporate network and maintaining predictable and reliable application performance is a challenging task that is getting harder with industry trends such as cloud computing, virtualization, consolidation, and other industry trends. Historically, performance management solutions have managed network and application performance in isolation, leading to slow troubleshooting and insufficient understanding of the IT environment. Cascade is an applicationaware network performance management (NPM) solution from Riverbed Technology that understands the relationship between application performance and the network. It is the only solution to enable network operations teams to find and fix network and application performance issues, no matter the architecture whether using a traditional network, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), server virtualization, or software-defined network (SDN). The Cascade solution provides a centralized view of all applications running across networks, early warning of brewing performance issues, and end-to-end visibility that, according to IDC, dramatically accelerates troubleshooting by as much as 67%.
Service monitoring Cascade Profiler appliance features advanced analytics to automatically detect and alert on meaningful changes in performance, providing proactive notification of brewing issues. Its service dashboards provide a quick view into the end-to-end health of a business service that are visually shown by red-yellow-green health status indicators. Guided drill down gets deeper and deeper into the details of the most critical applications and provides essential data for fast troubleshooting. Application services are created using a discovery wizard that automates the process of mapping transactions to its underlying infrastructure and ensures that service definitions are always accurate and up to date.
Figure 1: Alert raised based on deviation from historical baseline; blue line represents current behavior, the green band shows typical historical ranges of normal behavior responsiveness, and the pink column shows the event trigger where current activity exceeded normal expectations.
Discovery and dependency mapping Cascade Profiler appliance includes a discovery wizard that creates application dashboards that automate the process of mapping transactions to their underlying infrastructure so that application definitions and interdependencies are accurate including discovering through F5, Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager and other application delivery controllers (ADCs). The service maps created become the basis of service dashboards and are invaluable tools for accelerating troubleshooting across complex application ecosystems, and planning for data center consolidation or cloud, disaster recovery, and virtualization initiatives.
Figure 3: Service dashboards provide a quick view into the end-to-end health of critical applications that are visually shown by red-yellow-green health status indicators
Support for server virtualization and VMware VXLAN SDN VXLAN virtual overlay networks solves the problem of quickly provisioning network and security services and removes the barrier to vMotion across clusters, but because the traffic is UDP encapsulated, it obscures visibility into traffic details. Riverbed and VMware have developed the new VXLAN-aware IPFIX format, which enables Cascade products to provide detailed information about what virtual overlay networks are running on the physical network, what applications are involved, and which hosts and virtual tunnel endpoints are generating the traffic.
Figure 2: Uncovering underlying dependencies through the discover wizard is an essential tool for planning and keeping todays strategic IT initiatives on-track
Cascades ability to provide service maps to the various application and infrastructure support teams is very powerful, so much so that we incorporated it into our change process
Joe Garland, VP of Technology, Jeffries & Company
Whether preparing for a data center move, a capacity planning project or implementing data center virtualization or consolidation Cascades end-to-end visibility gets all teams involved working together to do accurate planning so critical projects are done efficiently and expediently the first time. A discovery wizard maps application dependencies to allow teams to visually understand what the dependencies are before any action takes place. This type of visibility is critical for these projects so all teams have the same view of what the project entails. Cascade products reduce the time time projects take to complete, saving money while boosting efficiency.
We now have a much more effective network management process and can quickly determine where a problem is in the network and what applications and services are being impacted. Our goal is to be in an increasingly proactive mode where we know all about network and application problems before the user reports on them. With Cascade we achieved this
Joe Harrington, Director Network Services, Boston College
End-user experience
Whether they are in the office, on the road or working from home, users expect increasing levels of reliability, stability, and performance from their applications. Consistent and reliable services to the end user are essential for successful business operations and productivity. Cascade products allow the network operations team to pinpoint and respond quickly to performance issues, whether dealing with network latency, server response time issues, QoS settings, etc. Network managers are empowered to easily plan for successful WAN optimization and application rollouts. Cascade Profiler, Cascade Gateway, Cascade Shark and Cascade Pilot products are designed to be integrated seamlessly. Cascade Pilot software is used to access packet level information stored on Cascade Shark appliances for packet and transactional analysis or multi-segment analysis. Cascade products also provide unparalleled reporting on Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimized environments that quantify the benefits of using Steelhead appliances. It accurately reports on application performance across optimized and non-optimized sites and can help identify additional optimization candidates. Cascade products provide monitoring and reporting on VDI (Ctrix and VMware view) and CIFs traffic to validate or troubleshoot QoS classifications and performance issues with these commonly accelerated applications.
Figure 4: Cascade Profiler appliance dashboards provide high level views of application and network performance with one-click drill-down for root cause analysis and problem isolation.
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Figure 5: Deployment of the complete Cascade solution
Product Models
Cascade Profiler appliance is typically deployed with Cascade Gateway appliance, which collects and forwards flow metrics from network devices such as routers and switches. Cascade Shark and Steelhead products also send performance metrics called CascadeFlow to Cascade Profiler appliance for centralized monitoring, analysis, and reporting. Cascade Profiler appliance supports from 100,000 800,000 flows per minute. Cascade Profiler VE Model Configurations Flow Capacity Cascade Gateway VE Flow Capacity Comes in 15,000, 30,000, 60,000, 90,0000 L 100,000 CAP-2260 Series M 200,000 H 500,000 N/A CAP-4260 CAP-4260-UI CAP-4260-DB N/A CAP-4260-N 800,000 CAP-4260 Expansion CAP-4260-EX CAP-4260-DP 400,000 N/A
Cascade Gateway appliance is sized according to flow capacity and is available in five models, ranging from 100,000 flows per minute to 1.4 million flows per minute as well as the virtual edition (VE) that ranges from 15,000 90,000 flows per minute. Cascade Gateways Model Configurations Flow Capacity Cascade Gateway VE Flow Capacity Comes in 15,000, 30,000, 60,000, 90,0000 F1 100,000 F2 200,000 CAG-2260 Series F3 500,000 F4 800,000 F5 1.4 million
About Riverbed
Riverbed delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.
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