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Riverbed Cascade
Effective Planning and Risk Management for Datacenter Moves
Effective Planning and Risk Management for Datacenter Moves
Understand the dependencies between users, applications, servers and systems before embarking on significant changes at the datacenter.
Whether it’s for server consolidation, datacenter consolidation or disaster recovery implementation, any significant change to a datacenter is a major undertaking that consumes significant time and resources and is fraught with risk. The planning process is long, often reliant on manual processes and therefore error-prone. And it is unfortunately too common that services are difficult to restore because of errors in the audit or configuration process.
There are four key requirements of success that are currently missing from most organizations’ data center consolidation or migration projects:
- Application-server dependencies or which servers run which applications.
- Server-server dependencies or how servers work together to provide critical business services.
- Business impact of change or which business users are dependent on which servers and applications and when.
- Performance management during the return to service period to identify and resolve problems quickly.
How Can Cascade Help?
Riverbed Cascade combines network flow data already existing in an IT infrastructure with Network behaviour Analysis to provide the information IT teams need to minimize the risk of datacenter change by:
Passively discovering which servers run which applications eliminating the need for manual discovery by outsourced professional services personnel
Providing server-server dependency maps assuring that planners reassemble servers correctly the first time reducing the risk of service disruption on return to service
Providing baselines of user activity by application and server to identify the optimal change window and minimize service disruption
Providing state of the art application performance reporting and analysis to streamline troubleshooting of unforeseen problems on return to service.
Riverbed Cascade combines network flow data already existing in an IT infrastructure with Network behaviour Analysis to provide the information IT teams need to minimize the risk of datacenter change by:
Passively discovering which servers run which applications eliminating the need for manual discovery by outsourced professional services personnel Providing server-server dependency maps assuring that planners reassemble servers correctly the first time reducing the risk of service disruption on return to service Providing baselines of user activity by application and server to identify the optimal change window and minimize service disruption Providing state of the art application performance reporting and analysis to streamline troubleshooting of unforeseen problems on return to service. 
How Riverbed Cascade Works
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Riverbed Cascade combines the best approaches to monitoring, analysis, reporting, and alerting in one highly automated solution. Cascade incorporates advanced Network behaviour Analysis (NBA) technology. Cascade's NBA implementation is the most advanced in the industry allowing customers to implement automated network and application monitoring and analysis with a significantly reduced burden on expert operations staff. Cascade's unique User Defined Policies, allow users to easily construct advanced monitoring and control policies to avoid known contributors to degraded performance.
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These technologies combine to reduce the number of false positive alerts or ‘alarm noise' common to threshold based monitoring systems. Additionally, Cascade provides rich contextual information for each alert that allows a) help desk staff to solve more problems and more correctly route escalated tickets; and b) expert staff to identify the root cause of performance issues more quickly shaving as much as 75% off of the time spent troubleshooting. |
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Complete and accurate usage and dependency data provide the key inputs for making the right optimization and change management decisions. Cascade also provides an extensive set of integrations, which enable it to interoperate intelligently with other systems to increase their value and improve your workflow. Cascade’s passive, agent-less deployment allows fast implementation. |
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Cascade Implementation
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These records are then further enhanced with user identification information provided by active directories,switch port information, QoS, and SNMP data. The result is a complete view of a business application flow from the back end server to the users desktop. Cascade also provides an extensive set of integrations, with management systems typically deployed in an IT environment to further streamline workflows and provide value across multiple operations teams. |