Load Balancer Featured Article

Riverbed Enhances Network Visibility in Load Balanced Environments

By Carrie Schmelkin, TMCnet Web Editor

Riverbed (News - Alert) Technology’s Cascade application-aware network performance management solution just got a whole lot cooler as the company announced its makeover to the application.

Cascade 9.5, the newest release that provides visibility into virtualized data centers and data centers that use load balancer application delivery controllers (ADC (News - Alert)), extends end-to-end service performance monitoring and troubleshooting – from the remote LAN, across the wide area network (WAN), and now deeper into the data center.

According to company officials, Cascade Profiler is the first network performance management solution to provide a wizard-based, streamlined configuration process for service monitoring across ADCs. Virtual Cascade Shark is touted as the first product to offer continuous packet capture and performance analysis in virtual environments.

Thanks to the new release, IT managers can enjoy capabilities for complex, global networks that include load balanced and virtualized data centers, according to company officials.

While enterprises generally enlist the help of ADCs to help with application delivery and resiliency, the process oftentimes results in network visibility problems and necessary metrics and application dependencies become masked. Cascade 9.5 addresses this problem by automating the discovery and monitoring of load balanced applications. By integrating with ADCs—F5 Local Traffic Manager, Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager, and others—Cascade bridges the visibility gap between the client-side and server-side connections of load balancers, providing IT operations with a view of application performance, officials said.

“The irresistible tide of server virtualization has combined with increasingly strategic deployments of application and network optimization technologies to create new and troublesome visibility barriers for IT operations,” said Jim Frey, managing research director at EMA (News - Alert). “This requires a fundamental re-assessment of performance monitoring and management technologies due to fast emerging requirements for integrated visibility and virtualized instrumentation. The Riverbed Cascade solution is evolving in this very direction, and coupled with the balance of the Riverbed optimization portfolio, comprises a unique and compelling combination of visibility and control for the evolving, virtualized enterprise IT infrastructure.”

Aside from addressing visibility problems that arise from deploying ADCs, Cascade also responds to visibility problems that abound because of virtualization. With virtualization, once an application enters a virtualized environment, IT managers lose visibility into application performance.

Cascade is designed to help managers navigate through this problem thanks to the Virtual Cascade Shark software which provides the real-time visibility needed to manage and troubleshoot application performance as it traverses the virtual switch in VMware ESX environments.

“Without Riverbed Cascade, it would be a trying experience to keep the network running on a day-to-day basis,” said Marc Seybold, CIO at SUNY College at Old Westbury. “If we were to turn off Cascade, then an accumulation of small problems would eventually grow into a rogue wave of problems, and we would not have the tools to know what is happening inside the network. Based on our experience with Cascade, we are very excited to gain the same level of performance management and visibility, into our virtualized environment, with the Virtual Cascade Shark.”

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