Application-Aware NPM: The Cascade Difference

DATA SHEET

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Centralized analysis and reporting Cascade® Profiler appliance, the centralized reporting and analysis console, and Cascade® Gateway flow collection appli-ance, are an integral part of Cascade solution family that gives IT and network managers the power to quickly and holistically view network and application performance problems and dramatically accelerate mented a Cascade solution typically experience 519 % ROI in less than six months.

A key focal point and strength of the Cascade solution is Cascade® Profiler appliance. It is the centralized analysis and reporting console. It correlates information collected by Cascade® Shark, Cascade Gateway, and Riverbed® Steelhead® appliances to provide proactive monitoring, analysis, and reporting of network and applications performance problems, automated discovery and dependency mapping, capacity and WAN optimization planning and analysis, and a consistent and reliable end-user experience. It utilizes network flow data and complements it with packet-based performance metrics to troubleshoot applica-tion and network performance.

Cascade® Profiler Virtual Edition software is a virtualized version of the Cascade Profiler appliance that runs on VMware vSphere to provide added deployment flexibility.

Data Sheet: Riverbed Cascade Profiler and Cascade Gateway

OverviewManaging a corporate network and main-taining 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, perfor-mance management solutions have managed network and application performance in isolation, leading to slow troubleshooting and insufficient understanding of the IT environment. Cascade® is an application-aware 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 acceler-ates troubleshooting by as much as 67%.

The Cascade Difference

• Maintain business continuity: preserve revenue

• Avoid or reduce IT costs

• Protect user experience and productivity

• Enhance IT collaboration and operational efficiency

• Speed problem identification and resolution

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Service monitoring – Cascade Profiler appliance features advanced analytics to automatically detect and alert on mean-ingful 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 2: Uncovering underlying dependencies through the discover wizard is an essential tool for planning and keeping today’s strategic IT initiatives on-track

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 accelerat-ing troubleshooting across complex application ecosystems, and planning for data center consolidation or cloud, disaster recov-ery, 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

Cascade Profiler featuresAutomated analytics – Proactive network management based on automated analytics is the single best way to identify problems before they impact the business. Cascade Profiler appliance tracks abnormanl events and gives off alerts raised based on the deviation from historical baseline. After learning baseline statistics, it uses proactive monitoring to trigger an alert once a deviation is detected, all without prior knowledge of specific apllications, path dependencies, and number of users or even router changes.

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.

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Gain an end-to-end, enterprise-wide viewCascade Gateway appliance collects flow data (NetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow, IPFIX and other popular flow statistics) from network devices, de-duplicates common information, and then forwards the data to the Cascade Profiler console for analysis. Deploying Cascade Gateway appliances in conjunction with Cascade Profiler appliance provides an easy and cost-effective way to gain end-to-end visibility into the network without having to install probes everywhere.

Cascade® Gateway Virtual Edition software is a virtualized version of the Cascade Gateway appliance that runs on VMware vSphere to provide added deployment flexibility.

Benefits of Cascade Gateway appliance over traditional flow collectors:

• End-to-end visibility into a flow, enabling reports from different devices to track packet loss or changing QoS

• Minimizes storage requirements as common information is stored only once, but unique information is stored

• Lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) with flow deduplication

Enhanced cross team collaboration Cross team collaboration is becoming essential between network operators and application managers. Cascade products enable this collaboration by empowering the application manager with new sets of the knowledge on how applications are operating. Customized views of how a specific application is running can be downloaded and forwarded to the application manager, or better yet, the applications manager can have these views avail-able for them when they need it most, so they can continuously monitor what they are responsible for, greatly diminishing the potential of any downtime.

Data Sheet: Riverbed Cascade Profiler and Cascade Gateway

“We now have a much more effective net-work management process and can quickly determine where a problem is in the net-work 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

“Cascade’s 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 consoli-dation Cascade’s 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.

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Figure 5: Deployment of the complete Cascade solution

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.

End-user experienceWhether 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 unparal-leled reporting on Riverbed Steelhead® WAN optimized environ-ments 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.

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Data Sheet: Riverbed Cascade Profiler and Cascade Gateway

Cascade Profiler VE

Model CAP-2260 Series CAP-4260 CAP-4260 Expansion

Configurations L M H CAP-4260-UI CAP-4260-DB CAP-4260-N CAP-4260-EX CAP-4260-DP

Flow Capacity 100,000 200,000 500,000 N/A N/A 800,000 400,000 N/A

Cascade Gateways

Model CAG-2260 Series

Configurations F1 F2 F3 F4 F5

Flow Capacity 100,000 200,000 500,000 800,000 1.4 million

Cascade Gateway VE

Flow Capacity Comes in 15,000, 30,000, 60,000, 90,0000

Cascade Gateway VE

Flow Capacity Comes in 15,000, 30,000, 60,000, 90,0000

Product ModelsCascade 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 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.

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Cascade Profiler key capabilitiesCascade Profiler provides end-to-end visibility into network and application performance to enable and assure a consistent and reliable experience to all users, regardless of where they sit in the enterprise. Cascade Profiler provides the following capabili-ties:

• Visibility everywhere: from the branch LAN, across the WAN, and deep into the data center – across physical, virtual and load balanced environments

• Service-level dashboards organize performance data by application and location to align awareness, visibility, and actions to business priorities

• Behavioral analytics that monitor performance metrics to uncover performance problems, providing early warning and enabling more efficient IT operations

• Discovery wizard that automates the process of discovery and dependency mapping of applications, for monitoring in dashboards that gives accurate and up-to-date understanding of application dependencies and performance

• Layer 7 application and network behavior monitoring, includ-ing conversations, user connections, and bandwidth utilization

• Response time analysis and latency metrics provide granular understanding of application behavior and user experience

• VoIP quality monitoring and reporting on jitter, packet loss, MOS, and R-Factor for H.323, SIP and Cisco SCCP (“Skinny”) signaling protocols

• 95th percentile reporting – a calculation for evaluating the regular and sustained utilization of a network connection and is useful for network capacity planning and billing

• Monitoring and reporting of optimized and non-optimized environments, which enables network managers to plan for WAN optimization, assess the impact of the deployment, and quantify benefits

• Facilitates effective communications across teams and col-leagues by having a highly flexible, on-demand and scheduled reporting abilities

• Compatible with iPad, iTouch and Android. View dashboards, analysis views and report on mobile devices and tablets for anywhere, anytime access

Cascade Gateway key capabilitiesCascade Gateway collects flow data from across the enterprise, de-duplicates it, compresses it, encrypts it, and then transmits it to Cascade Profiler for automated analysis, alerting, and report-ing. Some of the capabilities of Cascade Gateway include:

• Track 100% of all flow traffic on the network

• A range of flow capacity from 100,000 to 1.4 million flows per minute, depending on product model

• Supports all popular flow types, including NetFlow (V1, V5, V7 and V9), IPFIX, Enhanced NetFlow, NBAR,

• sFlow V2 and V5, J-Flow, cFlow, Packeteer FDR and Cascade-flow from Steelhead appliances

• Deduplicates flows for end-to-end flow visibility, better accuracy in reporting, and lower total cost of ownership

• Easily scales from small enterprises up to the world’s largest networks

• Transmits data to Cascade Profiler via TCP for enhanced reliability

• Compresses flow data between 5x to 10x for reduced impact on the network

• Forwards raw flow data to up to five other destinations

• Supports 1 minute data granularity

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About RiverbedRiverbed 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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