The challenge of efficiently delivering applications to dispersed users is growing increasingly complex, for small and large enterprises alike. As infrastructures become more complex, organizations are increasingly finding considerable gaps in their ability to monitor the performance of critical applications, and gain valuable information pertaining to optimizing application delivery.

LTI’s network assessment appliance combines visibility into end-to-end application delivery and network behavior analysis (NBA) to tackle these network management gaps. Our  network and application analysis and reporting solution spans WAN and telecommunications, application monitoring, network engineering, and data center operations groups to deliver enterprise-wide application performance analysis, and deliver data on server-application dependencies, as well as the tools for IT managers to immediately determine and resolve their bottlenecks for the delivery of applications spread across their infrastructure.

Our product provides an innovative way of managing application performance by analyzing the interactions of applications, systems, and network interfaces that encompass the application delivery infrastructure. Unlike other visibility and monitoring products, that only offer WAN interface specific views, our product collects the vast amount of application data from across the enterprise and turns it into relevant and valuable information. Our appliance creates application-centric, site-centric, and business-centric views that help managers address serious challenges, such as justification for WAN optimization investments, automated accessibility and performance analysis and reducing the cost and risks linked with server and data center consolidation initiatives.

LTI offers Riverbed’s Cascade, which collects network flow data that already exists in network devices such as switches, routers and WAN accelerators; then it enhances it with layer 7 application and user identification, and network performance metrics to provide visibility into how applications typically traverse the infrastructure. The Cascade subsequently applies behavioral analysis technology to determine application/user/server dependencies and identify significant changes in behavior that indicate performance or security issues. Unlike other approaches which simply generate large amounts of packet-level or interface specific data, Cascade uniquely presents a complex IT infrastructure in business and operational contexts by constructing user, application, interface or server groupings based on logical grouping. Automated customizable behavioral analytics empower users to recognize performance and availability problems before they interrupt business services – all without needing to sustain time-consuming and complex static thresholds.

Unlike products which necessitate deep packet inspection on every WAN link, Cascade's passive, agent-less deployment affords a quick yet cost-effective implementation and quick time to value. Cascade Gateways collects network flow data that already exist in an organization’s network to provide intelligent de-duplication, yet retaining information on where each flow was recorded, and sends this condensed data to the Cascade Profiler. The Profiler complements this information with layer 7 application and response time data collected from a Cascade Sensor installed in the datacenter. These records are then additionally augmented with user identification information provided by active directories, switch port information, QoS, and SNMP data. The final result is a full view of a business application flow from the back end server to the end user desktop. Cascade also delivers an extensive set of integrations, with management systems usually deployed in an IT environment to promote streamline workflows and supply value across multiple operations teams.

Our product offering affords users the capacity to properly manage performance and change in their IT infrastructures. As an end result, customers are able to guarantee the availability and performance of business applications as well as to significantly reduce costs and assure regulatory requirements. Customers use the Cascade for:

• Managing the WAN to accelerate business applications – Customers use Cascade to control the delivery of business applications across both optimized and unoptimized WAN links, and deliver a business justification of where additional optimization deployments will best accelerate vital business applications.
• Assuring robust delivery of vital business applications - Behavioral analytics combined with user-defined policies distribute the automation, information, and workflow assistance necessary to proactively assure service delivery. Contextual alerts provide the information needed to swiftly resolve problems.
• Minimizing the risk of data center moves – Automatic, passive discovery and application dependency mapping delivers the information needed for successful planning and execution. Discovering the potential impact of planned change will ensure an uneventful implementation.
• Reducing the cost of regulatory compliance - Visibility and reporting capacities support automated planning and policy enforcement to further reduce the effort and cost entailed to support audits. Irregular behavior discovery minimizes the need for costly hardware deployments.

Related Technologies

• Network Visibility & Analytics

Datasheets

Datasheets:

• 095: Riverbed's Cascade; Manage, Secure, & Optimize the Performance & Availability of Business Services
• 094: Riverbed Cascade v8.3; Out of the Box WAN Optimization Intelligence

Practice Area Overview: Network Performance Optimization