Riverbed Expands Network Management Lineup

Riverbed Technology is updating its network planning portfolio with three new capabilities that company officials said will make it easier for network administrators to troubleshoot their infrastructures and increase availability.

The vendor on Aug. 11 announced upgrades to its SteelCentral Network Planning and Configuration Management (NPCM) lineup, unveiling SteelCentral NetAuditor, NetPlanner and NetCollector.

The new offerings, which are available immediately, are designed to help organizations that have to collect data from a range of sources—both on-premise and in the cloud—and manage and configure the networks they have to run on. Much of what IT professionals have to do regarding network configuration has to be done manually, a time-consuming and error-prone process. The new features in NPCM help automate many of those tasks, enabling network administrators to better ensure that their networks are configured correctly to meet policy requirements while reducing outages linked to configuration issues by as much as 70 percent, according to Nik Koutsoukos, senior director of SteelCentral product marketing.

“As performance troubleshooting teams around the world know all too well, relying on out-of-date network change, topology and configuration data while keeping up with business-critical network and application obligations, drives high IT operational costs and poor staff productivity,” Koutsoukos said in a statement. “It is much better for businesses to prevent outages rather than troubleshoot them.”

SteelCentral NetAuditor is designed to detect errors in network device configuration and prevent service outages, according to officials. The software can improve mean-time-to-resolution by as much as three times, and helps with meeting security standards and complying with best practice policies.

NetPlanner helps organizations plan their network for hybrid architectures, combining data from multiple sources to give IT staffs a more comprehensive picture of network behavior and performance. The software also can evaluate potential changes to networks to assess any problems they present to configuration and performance.

Through NetCollector, users can automatically collect and reconcile network data from multiple physical and virtual sources, a chore that can consume a lot of time if done manually, according to Riverbed officials.