The VAR Guy

Riverbed Technology is coming off a stellar Q1 by announcing improvements to its Cascade network performance management product line, providing increased visibility into the network and enabling users to find issues through a top-down approach.

“Cascade basically helps people understand where the problems are in the network and deal with the problems as they arise,” said Yoav Eilat, director of product marketing for the Cascade Division at Riverbed. “This new capability gives folks the ability to take a top-down approach to network management – find a problem and then drill down.”

Current network management offerings, he said, help detect problems in a network, but they don’t all show exactly what the issue is on a granular level. “It’s like finding a needle in a haystack – you know it’s there, but it’s not easy to find. If you’re managing your network performance you access to all this data so that by the time it’s collected you have this huge haystack of information and it becomes more difficult to find the issue.”

The latest Cascade offering, however, takes the information and “zooms in” to find the issue. Views start at a high level, and users then can drill down level by level until they find the source of the problem.

That’s not much different than other network management solutions, Eilat noted, but what sets Cascade apart from its competitors is its ability to collect the network data from multiple management solutions to create one data set, so users have the ability to manage their entire network – be it data, voice, video or whatever – from one solution.

“All others have a bunch of different apps and clients that don’t really combine the data,” Eilat said. “You have to combine the data in your head – you can’t zoom into it.”

The new functionality, which is slated for availability later in the year, will be available as a software upgrade for existing Cascade users.

Eilat noted the packet capture and analysis functionality came to Riverbed through its 2010 acquisition of CACE Technology. “This is the result of the integration Riverbed has been doing since the acquisition and now all our products are talking to each other,” he said.

Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Weekly Newsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. Follow The VAR Guy via RSS, Facebook and Twitter. Follow experts at VARtweet. Read The VAR Guy’s editorial disclosures here.

Read More About This Topic

• Channel Partner Program Roundup: Riverbed, F5 Networks
• Riverbed Closes Out 2011 with Major Upgrade to RiOS
• Tech News: Five Signs The VAR Guy is A Bad Journalist, Dec. 2
• Riverbed Addresses Asymmetric Traffic with New Stingray Line
• Riverbed Adds Steelhead Optimization for vSphere Replication