Cascade Gateway

Cascade Gateway collects flow data from across the enterprise, aggregates it, compresses it, encrypts it, and then transmits it to Cascade Profiler for automated analysis, alerting, and reporting. It provides network administrators with real-time visibility and historical insight into network metrics such as peak usage, QoS levels, and IP conversations, enabling them to make cost-effective decisions for optimizing network service delivery.

Cascade Gateway is designed to track 100% of all flow traffic to provide an enterprise-wide view of network traffic and performance, enabling IT managers to make network decisions with all the data—not just a subset. Cascade Gateway can be deployed with Cascade Profiler in the data center or multiple Gateways can deployed regionally with all reporting to a centrally located Cascade Profiler for additional scalability and performance.

End-to-end data model ensures accurate understanding
The starting point for assessing end-user experience is having a single accurate record for each conversation across the network, both client/server and server/server. Every connection across the network can be uniquely identified and recorded. The same logical flow may be observed at multiple different observation points and will probably yield different counts at each observation point. For example, data is dropped as the flow traverses different devices or even between the ingress and egress within the same device.

For both user experience management and problem triage, it is critical to maintain accurate end-to-end and interface-by-interface views. Failure to create such a data model can lead to misunderstanding of asymmetric route paths, packet loss across an individual network interface or within a router queue, changes in interface-specific QoS markings, and more.

Riverbed Cascade builds a single end-to-end model of all client/server and server/server connectivity on the network. This model is based on gathered flow data (NetFlow, IPFIX, sFlow, etc.) correlated and deduplicated across all flow sources and annotated with information gathered from strategically placed Cascade Sensors, providing performance metrics, layer-7 application identification, and optimization data from Steelhead appliances.

Cascade Gateway collates and deduplicates flows seen by multiple devices to provide a single view of the entire flow. At the same time, it appends the individual device–specific metrics to the flow so that rich metrics are available for interface-specific drill down so there is no loss of ability to report correctly by interface.

Cascade Gateway provides many benefits over traditional flow collectors, including:

• End-to-end visibility into a flow, which enables correlation of reports from different devices to track packet loss or changing QoS tags
• Minimizing storage requirements as common information is stored only once
• Avoids over reporting
• Lower total cost of ownership. Since most flow collection devices – including Cascade – are priced according to flow count, flow de-duplication provides the added benefit of lower total cost of ownership

Cascade Gateway collects flow data from across the enterprise, aggregates it, compresses it, encrypts it, and then transmits it to Cascade Profiler for automated analysis, alerting, and reporting. 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 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 Cascadeflow 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 up to five Cascade Profiler systems
• 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

Cascade Gateway reports on flow-based metrics, such as traffic volume.

This link congestion alert was generated automatically based on behavioral analytics when utilization exceeded normal parameters.

Cascade Gateway also reports on top senders and applications, as identified by port.  Note that not all top senders are presented in this alert, only those that exceeded their typical utilization, helping to accelerate problem diagnosis.