Riverbed Cascade 10.0 Increases Virtual Visibility

Beleagured network network operations teams who are the first to hear about bad news from aggrieved users when communications links under-perform, got some help from Riverbed Technology when the company introduced Cascade 10.0. This new product addresses network and application performance issues across three levels of virtualization, including VDI, server virtualization and fully virtualized data centers that employ VXLAN software defined networks.

The lack of comprehensive visibility into virtual network environments has made it difficult for network admins to fix performance problems, but Cascade 10.0 has opened doors that were previously locked. "We can now plug into the hypervisor and see what's going on there," says Dimitri Vlachos, senior director of products and marketing at Riverbed.

That means users can now centrally monitor and manage images and data from VDI sessions based on the PCoIP and ICA protocols, which are offered by VMware View and the newly integrated Citrix XenDesktop-XenApp offering. Specifically, visibility is provided for actions such as screen refresh, print, type, etc. These details are critical for troubleshooting and optimizing the performance of interactive apps in VDI environments. The Common Internet File Systems (CIFS) protocol is also supported.

Cascade 10.0 further monitors performance of VXLAN SDNs by providing visibility into the UDP-encapsulated traffic and virtual tunnel endpoints, which enables network operation teams to control and comprehend VXLAN virtual overlay network performance; monitor and troubleshoot software-defined data centers and physical networks in a single solution; and provide software-defined data center owners with a singular view into data center performance and service level agreements.

In its press release, Riverbed quoted a happy user, Jeff Boyer, who is network engineer at Ministry Health Care. "The Riverbed Cascade products give us the visibility we need to monitor application performance, even if the underlying traffic never touches the physical network," Boyer says, adding "The flexibility of the solution allows us to proactively monitor and alert for performance metrics that can impact the end-user experience, whether the application is hosted on physical or virtual servers."

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/29/2012 at 12:48 PM