Bangalore: Today, Riverbed Technology the IT performance company, introduced new capabilities to its Cascade application-aware network performance management (NPM) solution, which delivers the needed visibility into virtualized data centers and data centers that use load balancing application delivery controllers (ADCs). This new release, Cascade 9.5, 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. Cascade Profiler is the first NPM solution to provide a wizard-based, streamlined configuration process for service monitoring across ADCs. Virtual Cascade Shark™ is the first product to offer continuous packet capture and performance analysis in virtual environments. With this new release, the Cascade product line has unmatched capabilities for complex, global networks that include load-balanced and virtualized data centers.

Enterprise customers deploy ADCs to optimize application delivery, flexibility and resiliency. The challenges presented by load balancing ADCs create significant visibility problems for network operations—by masking the necessary metrics and application dependencies—limiting their ability to monitor for end-to-end performance or troubleshoot degradations. Cascade 9.5 automates 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.

“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. “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.”

The new Virtual Cascade Shark software provides the real-time visibility needed to manage and troubleshoot application performance as it traverses the virtual switch in VMware ESX environments. Virtual Cascade Shark monitors all inter-virtual machine traffic, exporting application-enhanced traffic metrics to the Cascade Profiler performance management dashboard, for centralized service-level discovery and monitoring and accelerated troubleshooting. It also continuously captures packets and stores them on the local server or in a storage area network (SAN) for back-in-time analysis with Cascade Pilot network analysis software.