Riverbed unveils Cascade 9.5 network management tool update

Riverbed has released an update to its Cascade network monitoring and management platform, which will improve administrators ability to manage traffic associated with virtualised servers.

The tool will support integration with the F5 and Stingray traffic managers to help administrators work with load balancing platforms to analyse traffic and application performance.

Additionally, the platform will integrate with the VMware ESXi platform, allowing administrators to view and analyse traffic on virtualised systems.

The Cascade 9.5 release will also support integration with VoIP platforms. The update will monitor and report traffic quality, allowing administrators to spot bottlenecks which can degrade the quality of calls.

Dimitri Vlachos, Riverbed senior director of marketing and product management, told V3 that the new release would allow administrators to better analyse traffic and manage network activity for increasingly complex networks which combine physical and virtualised servers and appliances.

"In the past, you had physical servers you could monitor from the network," Vlachos explained.

"When you move into a virtualised environment, you can no longer get to that traffic, it becomes a black hole for IT and network management operations."

The Cascade 9.5 update is part of a larger strategy from Riverbed to update its full line of network monitoring and WAN optimisation appliances.

Vlachos said that the aim of the update was to address a gap which currently exists between network management tools and the latest generation of server and application platforms.

"There is a real movement afloat, the older ways of network performance management don't work," he said.