Riverbed Cascade (formerly Mazu): Advanced network and application performance analysis and reporting

The challenge of effectively delivering applications to distributed users is growing increasingly complex, for small and large enterprises alike. As infrastructures become more complex, organizations are increasingly finding significant gaps in their ability to monitor the performance of critical applications, and gain actionable information to optimize application delivery.

Riverbed Cascade™ combines visibility into end-to-end application delivery and Network Behavior Analysis (NBA) to address these management gaps. Riverbed's network and application analysis and reporting solution spans WAN and telecommunications, network engineering, application monitoring, and data center operations groups to provide enterprise-wide application performance analysis, data on server and application dependencies, and the tools for IT managers to immediately determine their bottlenecks for the delivery of applications across their infrastructure.

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Riverbed Cascade’s user configurable dashboards give managers quick access to actionable information

How it Works

Riverbed Cascade provides a new way of managing application performance by analyzing the interactions of users, applications, systems, and network interfaces that comprise the application delivery infrastructure. Unlike other visibility and monitoring products, that only offer WAN interface specific views, Riverbed Cascade takes vast amounts of application data from across the enterprise and turns it into actionable, relevant information. Cascade creates application-centric, site-centric, and business-centric views that help managers address critical challenges, such as WAN optimization justification, automated availability and performance analysis and reducing the cost and risks associated with server and data center consolidation initiatives.

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Cascade helps users provide a business justification for further WAN optimization

Cascade collects network flow data already existent in devices such as switches, routers and WAN optimization devices; it then enhances it with layer 7 application and user identification, and network performance metrics to provide visibility into how applications typically flow across an organization’s infrastructure. Cascade then applies behavioral analysis technology to determine user/application/server dependencies and detect meaningful changes in behavior that signal performance or security issues. Unlike other approaches which simply produce large amounts of packet-level or interface specific data, Cascade uniquely presents a complex IT infrastructure in business and operational contexts by creating user, application, interface or server groupings based on logical categories. Automated customizable behavioral analytics enable users to identify performance and availability issues before they disrupt business services – all without having to maintain complex and time-consuming static thresholds.

Implementation

Unlike solutions which require deep packet inspection on every WAN link, Cascade's passive, agent-less deployment allows fast and cost-effective implementation and quick time to value. Cascade Gateways collects network flow data already existing in an organization’s network provides intelligent de-duplication retaining information on where each flow was recorded, and sends this condensed data to the Cascade Profiler. Profiler complements this information with layer 7 application and response time data retrieved from a Cascade Sensor deployed in the datacenter. These records are then further enhanced with user identification information provided by active directories, switch port information, QoS, and SNMP data. The result is a complete view of a business application flow from the back end server to the users desktop. Cascade also provides an extensive set of integrations, with management systems typically deployed in an IT environment to further streamline workflows and provide value across multiple operations teams.

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Cascade passive, agent-less implementation deploys quickly, saves money, and provides a quick time to value

Cascade provides users the ability to effectively manage performance and change in their IT infrastructures. As a result, customers are able to ensure the availability and performance of business applications as well as to reduce costs and satisfy regulatory requirements. Specifically, customers use Cascade for:

• Managing the WAN to accelerate business applications – Customers use Cascade to manage the delivery of business applications across both optimized and unoptimized WAN links, and provide a business justification of where further optimization deployments will best accelerate critical business applications.
• Assuring robust delivery of critical business applications - Behavioral analytics combined with user-defined policies deliver the automation, information, and workflow assists needed to proactively assure service delivery. Contextual alerts provide the information needed to quickly resolve issues.
• Minimizing the risk of data center moves – Automated, passive discovery and application dependency mapping provides the information needed for effective planning and execution. Change impact information ensures smooth implementation.
• Reducing the cost of regulatory compliance - Visibility and reporting capabilities support automated planning and policy enforcement and reduce the effort and cost required to support audits. Anomalous behavior detection minimizes the need for expensive hardware deployments.