Riverbed Technology announced a virtual edition of Riverbed Cascade Express 460, which provides visibility into private cloud or software-defined data center environments running virtualized networks so IT teams can quickly view network and application performance and troubleshoot issues before end users notice.

An all-in-one network performance monitoring solution, Cascade Express 460 Virtual Edition, part of the Riverbed® Performance ManagementTM product family, combines monitoring of traditional and virtualized network environments in a single virtual appliance that can be deployed easily into any type of environment.

“Software-defined data centers built on private cloud technology offer tremendous savings and flexibility, so businesses are increasingly adopting this approach to provision new services on demand,” said Dimitri Vlachos, VP of marketing and products for Riverbed. “Cascade Express Virtual Edition enables customers to leverage powerful compute and network virtualization platforms while providing advanced application-aware network performance management. Customers gain a holistic view of their virtual and physical infrastructure, allowing them to have complete insight into application performance regardless of where the application is hosted and how it is delivered.”

Riverbed Cascade Express Virtual Edition runs on VMware vSphere and includes the following capabilities:

- End-to-end monitoring, analytics and reporting. Avoid impact to the business from bad apps with advanced analytics that automatically detect, isolate and pinpoint changes in performance. Map cloud application dependencies to accelerate troubleshooting across complex application ecosystems.

- High-speed packet capture and storage with deep packet inspection of more than 1,000 popular applications combined with robust flow collection and deduplication for automated traffic and performance analysis.

- A concurrent user license of Riverbed Cascade Pilot for graphically analyzing traffic data on the Cascade Express appliance without having to transfer large trace files across the network.

- Support for network virtualization and overlay networks, such as VMware NSXTM, to give operations teams a unified view of network and application performance across the physical and virtual infrastructure.

“Network virtualization transforms datacenter network operations in the software-defined data center,” said Hatem Naguib, VP, networking and security at VMware. “By deploying Riverbed Cascade Express Virtual Edition in conjunction with our VMware NSXTM network virtualization platform, customers can gain unified visibility into application and service delivery performance to help provide the best possible user experience.”

As an example of the platform integrations and how the synergistic capabilities of Riverbed solutions benefit customers, organizations that have Riverbed Steelhead appliances can leverage this investment to send both flow and packet data to Riverbed Cascade Express 460 for detailed analysis of Steelhead-optimized WAN and quality-of-service (QoS) settings by application. Riverbed Cascade Express 460 analyzes both non-optimized and optimized WAN environments, enabling IT teams to better plan for WAN optimization, assess the impact of the deployment and accurately quantify the benefits of WAN optimization.

Riverbed Cascade Express 460 Virtual Edition is currently available.