Complete end to end monitoring has become increasingly important as enterprises strive to move from legacy data centers to the promise of software defined environments. After all, network managers encumbered by missing pieces of the network connectivity puzzle are likely to fail the transition to software defined solutions. An observation made abundantly clear at Riverbed’s Disrupt Event held in Manhattan last week. Overcoming the obstacles of connectivity has become Riverbed’s clarion call, and the company is now offering comprehensive solutions that not only ease the transition to software defined solutions, but also bring much more control and information to the network management realm.
Case in point is the company’s move to products that embrace the ideologies of a Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN), such as the company’s SteelConnect 2.0, an application-defined SD-WAN solution. In an interview with GigaOM, Joshua Dobies, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed, said “the new capabilities offered allow branch offices to directly access the cloud, all without having to backhaul everything back to the data center.” Dobies added “SD-WAN paves the way for complete digital transformation, allowing enterprises to quickly access the benefits of the cloud, while not discarding their existing investments in Data Center Technologies.”
Of course, the wholesale movement to the cloud means that technologies must transition to platforms that enable transformation, without incurring disruption. A situation that proves to be the sweet spot for end to end monitoring. With the addition of full network visibility, along with end user experience monitoring, network managers now have the ability to identify connectivity and performance problems on the fly, and can quickly address those problems with policies and tuning.
With the introduction of Riverbed’s next version of its SD-WAN offering, SteelConnect 2.0, the company is giving its customers greater visibility throughout the network, thanks to integration with Riverbed’s SteelCentral, it’s end-to-end performance management platform, and SteelHead products and Riverbed’s Interceptor offering, which gives SteelConnect greater scale for dealing with larger enterprise deployments. Riverbed Chairman and CEO Jerry Kennelly said “Today, we’re delivering a software-defined architecture for a software-defined world, and expanding that infrastructure deeper into the cloud and more broadly across all end users.”
In addition to the new SteelConnect 2.0 release, SteelCentral, it’s end-to-end performance management platform will now incorporate technology from Aternity, which Riverbed acquired in July. Aternity brings the ability to monitor application performance on physical and mobile end-user devices to the SteelCentral product line. The addition of the Aternity technology and extending visibility into the end-user devices give Riverbed a full portfolio of management offerings, according to Nik Koutsoukos, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed. “This brings full end-to-end management capabilities to those who need it most” Koutsoukos told GigaOM.
