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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.