Riverbed Technology, in partnership with Vmware, is developing a performance management solution for software-defined networks (SDN) and the ability to provision wide area network (WAN) optimization for virtual data centers (VDC). The planned Riverbed solutions will ensure the operational viability and performance of VMware-based SDNs and VDCs.
Specifically, Riverbed is adding VXLAN support to its Cascade product family support to deliver a application-aware network performance management (NPM) solution for SDN performance management.
In addition, Riverbed Steelhead Cloud Edition will be further integrated with VMware vCloud Director® to simplify deployment, configuration, and management of wide area network (WAN) optimization-as-a-service for the VDC. VXLAN enables the quick and dynamic configuration of virtual networks that can span physical boundaries. However, with virtual overlay networks, traffic is encapsulated in tunnels across the physical network, which creates blind spots for the understanding and troubleshooting of performance issues. Riverbed and VMware are collaborating in the development of a new VXLAN-aware Internet Protocol Flow Information Export (IPFIX) format. This functionality would enable network and application performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting, allowing organizations to embrace SDNs without sacrificing operational control.
Riverbed also plans to release a Cascade Profiler Virtual Edition and Cascade Gateway Virtual Edition.
Riverbed said its Cascade product family, which is an application-aware NPM solution, can leverage this performance information about overlay network and UDP-encapsulated traffic to provide comprehensive and unified visibility across the WAN, LAN, virtual overlay networks and data centers in the cloud. This visibility enables network and virtualization teams to find and fix network and application performance problems.
“Our partnership with Riverbed was founded on the goal to help enterprises accelerate their journey to the cloud and enable businesses to increase efficiency and improve productivity while reducing costs. Rigid networking and security architectures based on purpose-built hardware and fragmented management interfaces pose a barrier to achieving the promise of the software-defined data center,” said Allwyn Sequeira, vice president and CTO, networking and security, at VMware. “This latest collaboration with Riverbed brings the needed visibility and performance to address the challenges associated with the next evolution of virtualization, and enables customers to embrace SDNs.”
