Riverbed's enhanced Cascade network performance management software leverages technologies acquired via its purchase last year of Cace.
Riverbed Technology is integrating
network analysis technology acquired through its purchase of Cace Technologies
with its own Cascade network performance management offering to create tools
that give network administrators a deeper and more robust view into their
infrastructures and applications.
Riverbed officials on May 3 unveiled
Cascade 9.0 and Cascade Pilot 3.0, which Yoav Eliat, director of product
marketing for Riverbed's Cascade products, said gives network administrators
complete and real-time views of the performance of their networks and
applications, and also gives them the tools to analyze what they are seeing.
Riverbed has taken the Shark and Pilot
products inherited in the company's October 2010 acquisition of Cace and "integrated
them with Cascade to create a view all the way from the high level [of the
network] to the low level," Eliat said in an interview with eWEEK.
Before the Cace deal, Riverbed could
offer network administrators a high level view of the network, Eliat said. Now,
with the Cace technology, Riverbed gives users a more complete view, all the
way down to the packet level, he said.
It's a more complete offering than that
of competitors, who tend to have some of the tools but can't give network
administrators such an end-to-end view, Eliat said. In addition, navigating
through the offerings and getting that insight into the network and applications
involve a few clicks, rather than having to move from one application to
another, he said. If there is a problem in the network, users through the
unified interface can zoom in down to the packet level to find the issue and
troubleshoot it.
The integrated products, which Eliat
said will be available this quarter, are the result of "seven months of
heavy-duty work" to get the products from Cace to work in an integrated fashion
with Riverbed's Cascade offerings. Through the deal, which cost Riverbed less
than $20 million, the company acquired Cace's Shark and Pilot products for
their packet-level capture and analysis capabilities.
Riverbed also assumed the lead role in
the development of the open-source Wireshark network performance
management technology. That sponsorship had belonged to Cace, Eliat said. At
the time the deal was announced, Riverbed officials said they were committed to
keeping Wireshark open. That pleased Wireshark supporters.
"Everyone I've talked to at
Riverbed from the CEO and CTO on down is committed to Wireshark and to its
community. They realize we have a good thing going and they want to keep it
that way," Gerald Combs, the analyzer's original author, wrote at the time
on the official Wireshark blog.
Riverbed's new offerings fully
integrate the company's Cascade Profiler, an application-aware network
performance management product, with Cascade Shark, a network traffic recording
appliance, and Cascade Pilot, which is network analysis software.
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