Managing the WAN to Accelerate Business Applications with Riverbed Cascade (formerly Mazu)

In a time when operating budgets are under pressure, WAN expenses must be aligned with business needs. IT organizations need to be able to clearly show how WAN budgets are tied to business execution. Managers in charge of the WAN need visibility into the business content of the traffic they deliver. They need to be able to tell when WAN congestion affects business services and assure that congestion is not caused by non-business usage.

Cascade customers have unprecedented visibility that includes:

• Layer 7 visibility into application traffic by interface, by site or overall
• The delivery paths of applications from back-end servers to the user's desktop including WAN interfaces traversed
• Normal patterns of response time, user connections, bandwidth utilization, QoS and application health statistics
• Visibility into http traffic to distinguish between web front-ended business applications and non-business use

With this level of visibility, Cascade customers can:

• Document the benefits of existing WAN optimization deployments
• Provide a prioritized list of most congested WAN links
• Show which of these links carry critical business applications
• Document how this congestion effects application response times
• Show where new optimization deployments will best help expedite business

Riverbed Cascade combines the best approaches to monitoring, analysis, reporting, and alerting in one highly automated solution. Cascade incorporates advanced Network Behavior Analysis (NBA) technology. Cascade's NBA implementation is the most advanced in the industry allowing customers to implement automated network and application monitoring and analysis with a significantly reduced burden on expert operations staff. Cascade's unique User Defined Policies, allow users to easily construct advanced monitoring and control policies to avoid known contributors to degraded performance. These technologies combine to reduce the number of false positive alerts or 'alarm noise' common to threshold based monitoring systems. Additionally, Cascade provides rich contextual information for each alert that allows a) help desk staff to solve more problems and more correctly route escalated tickets; and b) expert staff to identify the root cause of performance issues more quickly shaving as much as 75% off of the time spent troubleshooting.

Cascade's unique capabilities enable our customers to significantly streamline operational planning and troubleshooting workflows across multiple operations teams. The most common use cases include:

• Managing the WAN to accelerate business applications
• Assuring robust delivery of critical business applications
• Minimizing the risk of datacenter moves
• Reducing the cost of regulatory compliance

Cascade in Action

An international news organization migrated from a hub and spoke WAN to an MPLS implementation. They were experiencing heavy bandwidth congestion that was impacting their core business applications. Using Cascade, they determined that up to 30% of the bandwidth available was being used by non-business peer-to-peer applications. They were able to implement a User Defined Policy to alert them whenever peer-to-peer traffic rose above 3% of available bandwidth and identify violators. The company used Cascade to align WAN expense with business applications and avoided a costly WAN upgrade.