Riverbed partners to provide best-of-breed network visibility

Riverbed Technology, a technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), is expanding its partner ecosystem and alliances with select visibility partners within the Riverbed Technology Alliance (RTA).

Working together, Riverbed and partners AlterPoint, OPNET, Compuware, Mazu Networks, NetDialog, and SolarWinds provide enterprises with complementary and compatibility-tested solutions to develop a comprehensive, best-of-breed strategy for managing their global business.

The combination of Riverbed and its visibility partners provides customers with the tools they need to analyse, manage and optimise their critical wide area network (WAN) infrastructure and ensure the best possible performance for all applications and all users, regardless of location. Customers are able to analyse their infrastructure to gain visibility into their communications infrastructure and business-critical applications. In addition, they are able to manage their resources to ensure efficient and consistent operation of their infrastructure and application environment. Lastly, by working with Riverbed and its partners, they are able to optimise their IT infrastructure to improve business performance.

"Customer implementations of the Riverbed WDS solutions have moved far beyond the tactical to the strategic," said Alan Saldich, vice president of product marketing and alliances at Riverbed. "As WDS has become the new network-based IT platform for the 21st century distributed workplace, major enterprises have made pre- and post-deployment visibility into all their traffic, accelerated or not, a requirement."

Riverbed visibility partners provide complementary solutions that address pre-deployment application performance simulation and planning, post-deployment application monitoring and visibility, performance trouble-shooting, policy and device configuration management, and service provider oriented service level agreements (SLA) reporting. RTA partners are complementary technology companies who share a common vision of accelerating application performance, simplifying network management and infrastructure, reducing replication and backup time-frames, and delivering significant savings as customers increasingly use the WAN to enable global business.

"While Riverbed offers good visibility and control tools with SteelheadR products, our approach has always been to give customers flexibility and choice," continued Saldich. "By partnering with other technology leaders that provide best-of-breed offerings, Riverbed delivers more complete solutions that integrate or interoperate with existing enterprise visibility solutions to give customers a view of their whole network, including Steelhead appliances."

With a comprehensive network management strategy, enterprises are better able to analyse, manage, optimise and accelerate business applications over the WAN.

Enterprises can now leverage end-to-end network management and infrastructure to strategically utilise the following functions:

• Planning for network and server resources and components needed to optimise application performance before WDS products are deployed
• Visibility into key applications performance expectations and end user performance
• Identification and isolation of application performance problems
• Post-WDS deployment analysis to ensure, measure and report on performance gains
• Management capabilities to ensure compliance with internal guidelines and policies
• Network auditing capabilities to determine adherence with SLAs

"Network management is a key component to any IT operations. Network managers need tools that will make their job easier and do not introduce incompatibility challenges and expansive fees," said Tracy Corbo, Senior Analyst, Network and Service Management at IDC. "As the corporate network becomes more complex, enterprises will look to vendors that provide compatible solutions to support their business strategies, core management processes, and operations."

By working together, SolarWinds and Riverbed are able to deliver to our joint customers the tools they need to more proactively run their networks," said Josh Stephens, director of Technology, SolarWinds. "The additional visibility and control provided by SolarWinds will allow Riverbed customers to reap greater benefits from their Steelhead product deployments, including more intelligent deployment strategies and reduced operational expense."

"OPNET is delighted to participate in Riverbed's Technology Alliance program," stated Marc Cohen, OPNET's Chairman and CEO. "Our mutual customers will benefit significantly from the combination of our best-of-breed offerings, and the integrated support for Steelhead appliances in our full life-cycle solutions for application performance management."

"Mazu Networks brings an innovative and unrivalled approach to performance management by providing IT operations teams with intelligence based on the behavior of the network," said Alex Alvarez, director, business development, Mazu Networks. "Combining our leading behavior-based performance and availability solution with Riverbed's WDS enables customers to dramatically improve their ability to deliver critical business services."