Riverbed Technology announced new SteelCentral network performance management (NPM) solutions specifically designed to provide visibility to applications across the hybrid enterprise – data centers with a mix of both public and private networks and a combination of on-premises and SaaS/cloud apps, which is fast becoming the new normal.

The new and updated SteelCentral NPM appliances – NetShark and NetProfiler – provide faster and more granular views of the performance of both on-premises and cloud applications. This is essential to meet the growing demands of application performance for more users connected to more networks that is the continual state of IT today.

Today’s applications are making more connections to deliver the same data. Browsers and servers are getting smarter about how they break up and access data and this creates more connections. Web pages are getting content from more and different places – like ads, Google maps, social media links – and this also increases connection counts. Also, certain protocols, such as Microsoft’s protocol for O365 and Exchange, create more connections. The new SteelCentral solution enhancements provide the increased storage, memory, and power that Riverbed’s customers need to monitor this expanding environment of increasing connections and flows as required by the hybrid enterprise.

“As enterprises embrace BYOD and modern web, mobile, and SaaS applications, the amount of traffic on the network grows exponentially, so visibility becomes more important than ever,” said Mike Sargent, SVP and GM, SteelCentral at Riverbed. “With so much business depending on the flawless performance of applications and networks, companies need to prevent outages rather than troubleshoot them and that’s exactly what these faster SteelCentral solutions enable.”

The new Riverbed NPM appliances give IT teams the application visibility and control they need in hybrid IT environments, and as more people and devices are connected to the network.

The new NetProfiler appliances and features provide software and licensing changes that significantly increase scale across the board for NetProfiler users, including:

- Supports twice the number of de-duplicated flows per minute (FPM) on a smaller hardware footprint

- Supports twice the reporting devices per flow record; collates and de-duplicates flow information from up to 10 devices per single flow record for a more granular view of network performance

- Supports 10x the number of analytics policies

- Bundles analytics license with enterprise and standard NetProfiler licenses so all customers get proactive anomaly detection and early warning notification

- Covers triple the number of end-user locations in the Services Dashboard

The new NetShark appliances are available in three models – the low-end 2170, mid-range 4170, and the high-end, modular 6170 – all with the following performance enhancements:

- Larger, redundant system and packet storage (up to 72TB of packet storage)

- Significantly more memory (32/64GB) for higher flow export rates to NetProfiler

- Higher 10G port density

- NetShark Virtual Edition is also now available on Microsoft Hyper-V

SteelCentral Flow Gateway, which provides the flow collection and de-duplication for NetProfiler, adds a new two-million-flows-per-minute licensing tier to support the higher flow counts within NetProfiler with a smaller hardware footprint. New versions of the SteelCentral NetExpress all-in-one network performance-monitoring appliance for small- and mid-size enterprises are also available.

The newest SteelCentral NPM products are currently available.