Riverbed Launches Two New Visibility Solutions to Enable 360-degree View of Enterprise IT

[51CTO.com original article] Riverbed recently announced the launch of two new solutions to improve network performance:

One is the Riverbed SteelCentral Application Performance Command Center, which further expands its comprehensive performance monitoring and management solutions to address the blind spots of enterprises in managing emerging mobile and cloud technologies and achieve comprehensive performance visualization of networks, infrastructure, unified communications and end users.

The other is the SteelCentral SaaS solution, which addresses the blind spots of enterprises in managing emerging mobile and cloud technologies, achieves end-to-end visibility within and outside the cloud, and uses SteelCentral Aternity to extend monitoring capabilities to any terminal device.

Software and cloud bring new ideas for network construction

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When asked why the two new solutions were released in December, Zhang Xiaohe, technical director of Riverbed Greater China, believed that it was an inevitable trend. He said that the demand for digital transformation of enterprises can already be felt in a real and tangible way. More and more enterprise customers are considering how to drive industrial upgrading and improve business efficiency through digital transformation. When hardware and technology vendors are decoupled, it is not difficult to find that digital transformation is driving a wave of software delivery, with software replacing services for delivery. "With the emergence and commercialization of new business and service forms, it can be clearly seen that the proportion of solutions and products delivered in a digital way is increasing worldwide, among which software and service delivery methods are the most common."

Digital transformation has also brought about changes in people's thinking. When an enterprise wants to build an IT infrastructure, it will first consider how to network in the data center, how to build an infrastructure platform, and how to define the data center with software. At the same time, with the improvement of cloud business, newly established IT companies will gradually turn to cloud thinking to build IT infrastructure, which is also a major impact on traditional IT thinking.

New SteelCentral Solution Provides Seamless Visibility for the Enterprise

A unified solution for network forensics, network-based applications, and end-user experience monitoring. Zhang Xiaohe said that Riverbed's release includes SteelCentral App Response 11, which combines the company's two network-based monitoring solutions, SteelCentral App Response and SteelCentral NetShark, to provide network forensics and analysis, application analysis, and end-user experience monitoring through a comprehensive and convenient solution.

Because the solution provides predefined analysis views (Insights) and expert analysis, it is helpful for both novice and expert users. At the same time, SteelCentral AppResponse 11 greatly enriches the performance indicators for users, providing fine-grained transaction data that previously required data packet analysis to obtain, improving analysis speed and reducing mean time to repair (MTTR).

The reporter learned that the enhanced version of SteelCentral improves the communication and interoperability between performance monitoring modules, helping enterprises better manage data packets, infrastructure, various applications and unified communications. In addition, SteelCentral has also expanded the end-user experience management capabilities to better respond to the changing demands of modern enterprise IT from various new devices, new platforms and new things.

Infrastructure information acquisition, management and troubleshooting. Riverbed also introduced SteelCentral NetIM, a comprehensive solution for infrastructure exploration, monitoring, analysis and troubleshooting, which helps enterprises obtain infrastructure information, determine status, detect performance and configuration problems, draw and monitor application network paths, and troubleshoot infrastructure problems. As an integrated component of SteelCentral, NetIM users can comprehensively analyze the overall performance of the network, applications, user experience, etc. to troubleshoot infrastructure problems.

Intelligent voice call path analysis and troubleshooting. The newly released SteelCentralUCExpert is a multi-vendor unified communications monitoring solution that introduces intelligent path analysis and troubleshooting technology, allowing IT staff to monitor the entire call path of a specific call and all relevant performance indicators including equipment, networks, and specific settings that affect caller and recipient services. Unlike competitor products, we do not force managers to manually correlate call and network information. On the contrary, this new analysis allows managers to quickly identify network-based unified communications problems, greatly reducing troubleshooting time.

Strengthen enterprise end-user experience management. SteelCentral Aternity helps ensure that IT departments get the best end-user experience with consistent, unified workflows and display panels on all devices, including Mac and Windows OS. In addition, it introduces unique end-to-end analysis technology that enables third-level support teams to verify the impact of strategic changes such as Windows 10 migration before launching a comprehensive enterprise plan, ultimately helping these teams reduce the risk of costly application and device rollbacks and verify the impact of application and device health changes.

SteelCentral SaaS enables end-to-end visibility in and out of the cloud

Comprehensive visualization for both inside and outside the cloud. Riverbed's SteelCentral SaaS combines end-user experience with application monitoring and network performance monitoring. As enterprises increasingly rely on the cloud to help them shorten application release cycles and reduce costs, it is very challenging to maintain unified visualization of multi-layer applications. Traditional APM (application performance management) tools are completely ignorant of network performance issues that affect the performance of cloud-hosted applications. As a SaaS solution, SteelCentral can visualize applications, end users, and network performance, providing enterprises with a comprehensive monitoring solution for cloud applications.

End-user experience monitoring: With the recent acquisition of Aternity, a leading provider of end-user experience (EUE) monitoring solutions, Riverbed has expanded SteelCentral to include EUE monitoring for all applications running on physical, virtual or mobile devices. With the addition of SteelCentral Aternity, SteelCentral can collect data from a wide range of sources, including application servers, application code, UC systems, LANs, WANs, browsers and end-user devices, helping customers quickly identify and fix performance problems no matter where they occur.

At the end of the interview, Zhang Xiaohe told the reporter a set of data: IDC once predicted that by 2017, 60% of digital transformation initiatives will not be able to expand due to the lack of strategic architecture; and by 2018, 70% of digital transformation initiatives that are independent of each other will fail due to lack of collaboration, integration, procurement or project management. Research has found that these less mature digital enterprises tend to solve fragmented business problems with specific digital technologies in a piecemeal manner. As a result, enterprises cannot fully integrate digital technologies with operations, cannot solve the underlying infrastructure problems that frequently cause application performance problems within the enterprise, and cannot provide the required large-scale technical capabilities. "Enterprises will realize that in order to achieve the best synergy of applications, computing, storage and network infrastructure, all departments must work together, seamlessly connect, and form a community of shared destiny." Zhang Xiaohe emphasized that in view of this, Riverbed will implement a strategic architecture across the enterprise to integrate all components to form a seamless, software-defined system, and use this system to deliver high-performance applications, data and services.

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