Riverbed Enhancing RiOS WAN Optimization

Riverbed Technology announced enhancements to its Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) and Cascade solutions that provide the globally connected enterprise with business-level visibility and control for all types of traffic and applications.

As these organizations go beyond connecting the dots to reliance on the network as a critical business asset, they are demanding not only better application performance, but the ability to both understand how IT resources are being used and to apply fine-grained resource allocation.

With the upcoming releases of version 9.0 of Cascade, with its network and application performance analysis and visibility solution, and version 6.5 of RiOS, which powers the company’s wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions, Riverbed will provide a range of functionality that both extends visibility from the network engineer all the way to the C-suite and gives IT the ability to allocate resources based on the business needs of enterprises.

"With a widening variety of applications and services distributed over the network, enterprises require better insight into application performance to make intelligent IT decisions that further business goals," said Joe Skorupa, research vice president at Gartner. "Robust traffic management capabilities such as QoS classification and enforcement are required to prioritize business-critical traffic in order to deliver essential services that keep the business running."

The globally connected enterprise relies on the network to deliver applications and services to employees regardless of location. However, complexity and resource demands strain the network and make monitoring a difficult task. In addition, bandwidth-heavy and latency-sensitive applications such as video, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) make it essential to ensure that adequate resources are being allocated to business-critical applications.

With the release of Cascade 9.0 and RiOS 6.5, Riverbed will provide enterprises with easy-to-use solutions to ensure that enterprises have more visibility into their critical applications and services and how they are performing, as well as control over their application performance over the network. The Riverbed solutions are able to address visibility and control for all traffic and applications (for example, voice, video, collaboration, email, database, TCP and UDP) from anywhere to everywhere. To enable enterprises to easily understand and manage their IT environments, Riverbed introduces with these solutions new service level agreement (SLA) monitoring and reporting capabilities and new quality of service (QoS) enforcement to provide unparalleled levels of visibility, control and optimization that dynamically adapt to any enterprise IT environment.

Addressing Business Priorities
by Understanding Performance Challenges
To help enterprises better understand their IT performance, Cascade 9.0 provides customers with fine-grained classification of traffic, including advanced Layer-7 awareness and a single business-level performance view of applications and services. A new service-level dashboard provides an at-a-glance status of critical services and applications, with the ability to drill down to the location, application and user level, for better visibility and control. The new Service Discovery Wizard streamlines the process of discovering a multi-tier service and configuring its monitoring and dashboards. Enterprises now have an end-to-end service monitoring solution to help understand the interdependencies of various network components and pinpoint the root cause of a performance problem. In addition, a new service-level reporting capability provides enterprises with a business-level report that can draw a historical comparison of performance levels to help top management make intelligent decisions about network resource allocation.

Enhanced Control for Fine-Tuned IT Performance
Prioritizing and optimizing network traffic with business priorities in mind has become a growing concern for global IT organizations. To address these demands, Riverbed introduces enhanced control that enables enterprises to fine-tune their IT performance. With the introduction of RiOS 6.5, enterprises can now turn to a single appliance to deliver WAN optimization solutions and easy-to-deploy and manage QoS capabilities in a cost-effective manner.

New features in RiOS 6.5 provide enterprises
with advanced QoS capabilities, including:

• Riverbed AppFlow Classification Engine – With the growth in rich media and Web-based business applications, traditional classification methods based just on protocol or port won’t suffice. In order to provide the most accurate, efficient and flexible method of application visibility for these types of traffic, a new classification engine uses multiple techniques, including application signature matching, protocol dissection and behavior analysis.
• Latency-aware QoS – Applications need to be prioritized and have bandwidth allocated based on their sensitivity to latency. Grouping VoIP, latency-sensitive applications, file-sharing and latency-tolerant applications in the same class does not provide adequate control for enforcing the most predictable performance for all applications. For accurate classification of applications, allocation of minimum and maximum bandwidth and the ability to prioritize applications based on their latency sensitivity, enterprises will be able to take advantage of an advanced QoS scheduling technique based on the Hierarchical Fair Service Curves (HFSC) algorithm.
• Templated Scalable Management – Enterprises need an effortless way to deploy, use and manage QoS to enable greater responsiveness to business demands. This new feature simplifies the process of provisioning QoS into three simple steps, leveraging the Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC), a single Web interface that enables enterprises to configure, monitor, report on and upgrade groups of Steelhead appliances.

"As enterprises come to rely on more real-time, interactive, and rich media applications in their private environments or in the cloud, efficient management of network resources will become an increasingly important challenge. With these solutions, Riverbed is introducing features that help enterprises visualize and control their WAN more effectively," said Apurva Davé, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed. "This enables IT organizations to extend visibility to the C-suite and prioritize all types of traffic and applications based on business needs for their globally connected enterprise."

Availability: RiOS 6.5 and Cascade 9.0 are expected to be available in Q1 2011.