Riverbed Virtual Cascade Shark

A new feature in the latest release of Cascade 9.5, Riverbed Virtual Cascade Shark is the first product to offer continuous packet capture and performance analysis in virtual environments.

Virtualisation has transformed data centre environments in recent years but with all of the benefits virtualisation brings such as flexibility and cost savings, challenges are often created around visibility of application performance. Many organisations now face a fundamental re-assessment of their performance monitoring and management tools with a primary objective of technology integration for true control and visibility.

Riverbed's new Virtual Cascade Shark software provides the real-time visibility needed to manage and troubleshoot application performance as it traverses the virtual switch in VMware ESX environments.

Virtual Cascade Shark monitors all inter-virtual machine traffic, exporting application-enhanced traffic metrics to the Riverbed Cascade Profiler performance management dashboard, for centralised service-level discovery and monitoring and accelerated troubleshooting. It also continuously captures packets and stores them on the local server or in a storage area network (SAN) for back-in-time analysis with Riverbed Cascade Pilot network analysis software.

Riverbed Virtual Cascade Shark is expected to be generally available in Q1 2012.