Riverbed Cascade Express 460 Virtual Edition

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced a virtual edition of its Cascade Express 460, which provides visibility into private cloud or software-defined data center environments running virtualized networks so IT teams can view network and application performance and troubleshoot issues before end users notice.

An all-in-one network performance monitoring solution, it’s part of the Riverbed Performance Management product family, combines monitoring of traditional and virtualized network environments in a single virtual appliance that can be deployed into any type of environment.

Recognized by Gartner as the leader in the magic quadrants for both Application Performance Monitoring (2013) and Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (2014), the Performance Management family of products are solutions that combine user experience and application and network performance management to detect and enable customers to resolve issues before they impact end users.

“Software-defined data centers built on private cloud technology offer tremendous savings and flexibility, so businesses are increasingly adopting this approach to provision new services on demand,” said Dimitri Vlachos, VP marketing and products, Riverbed. “Cascade Express Virtual Edition enables customers to leverage powerful compute and network virtualization platforms while providing advanced application-aware network performance management. Customers gain a holistic view of their virtual and physical infrastructure, allowing them to have complete insight into application performance regardless of where the application is hosted and how it is delivered.“

“We first deployed Steelheads to accelerate our remote offices’ access to services in our data center. Shortly afterwards, we purchased Riverbed Cascade Express to give us visibility into our virtual remote desktop farm,” said Chris Niesen, IT engineering lead, Braun Intertec, an environmental engineering consulting and testing firm headquartered in Minneapolis, MN. “Our goal is to move from a 95% to a 100% virtualized environment, so we’re really happy to see Riverbed come out with this new virtualized form factor for Cascade Express 460. Whether it’s between datacenters or in the cloud, it gives us the flexibility to deploy Riverbed solutions in any kind of IT environment we choose and to move our monitoring where it’s needed.”

Cascade Express Virtual Edition runs on vSphere, includes following capabilities:

• End-to-end monitoring, analytics and reporting. Avoid impact to the business from bad apps with anaytics that automatically detect, isolate and pinpoint changes in performance. Map cloud application dependencies to accelerate troubleshooting across complex application ecosystems.
• High-speed packet capture and storage with packet inspection of more than 1,000 popular applications combined with flow collection and deduplication for automated traffic and performance analysis.
• A concurrent user license of Cascade Pilot for graphically analyzing traffic data on the Cascade Express appliance without having to transfer large trace files across the network.
• Support for network virtualization and overlay networks, such as VMware NSX, to give operations teams a unified view of network and application performance across the physical and virtual infrastructure.

“Network virtualization transforms datacenter network operations in the software-defined data center,” said Hatem Naguib, VP, networking and security, VMware, Inc. “By deploying Riverbed Cascade Express Virtual Edition in conjunction with our VMware NSXnetwork virtualization platform, customers can gain unified visibility into application and service delivery performance to help provide the best possible user experience.“

As an example of the platform integrations and how the synergistic capabilities of Riverbed solutions benefit customers, organizations that have Steelhead appliances can leverage this investment to send both flow and packet data to Cascade Express 460 for detailed analysis of Steelhead-optimized WAN and QoS settings by application. Cascade Express 460 analyzes both non-optimized and optimized WAN environments, enabling IT teams to better plan for WAN optimization, assess the impact of the deployment and quantify the benefits of WAN optimization.

Riverbed Performance Management and Application Performance Platform

• Performance Management provides enterprise end-user, application and network performance management. It delivers visibility, analytics and insight empowering companies to leverage IT to innovate and differentiate from the competition. RPM reduces the time and effort required to develop, deploy and ensure application performance. Its solutions are leveraged throughout today’s rapid application lifecycles and across IT operations and development teams, providing a centralized and common solution to maximize efficiency, performance and productivity in today’s application-driven world.
• RPM is part of the Application Performance Platform, a platform for location-independent computing that gives companies the flexibility to host applications and data in the locations that best serve the business while ensuring flawless application delivery to better leverage global resources, reduce the cost of running their business and maximize employee productivity.

Cascade Express 460 Virtual Edition is available and users can access a 30-day free trial.