Streamcore, a provider of cloud services delivery assurance solutions, announced new features to its StreamGroomer and SGM solutions, as part of the new 6.0 release, that enable business-oriented and network-aware visibility for application services delivered from a private, public or hybrid cloud, or from traditional data centers.

With the 6.0 release, enterprises can successfully adopt cloud services and rely on Streamcore solutions to supervise service levels, provide showback/chargeback reports to internal customers such as business units, and troubleshoot performance slowdowns.

The deployment of Streamcore products is highly flexible and can match any cloud services delivery model including: in front a corporate centralized Internet access to manage public cloud services (e.g., SaaS), in front of a data center MPLS access to manage the delivery of private cloud services, and even within branch offices to manage a direct access to external cloud services.

Rich Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and Measurement Engines to Monitor any Public/Private Cloud Application: In this new 6.0 release, Streamcore has reinforced its DPI technology to identify on the network any public or private cloud-based service, with a predefined catalog of more than 400 services (including Salesforce, Citrix GotoMeeting, etc.). An enterprise can automatically enable application performance measurements for any selected cloud-based service. A new end-to-end WAN service level management (SLM) indicator is available to easily detect when the branch network access is the source of performance degradations.

Automated Reports for Showback/Chargeback: New capabilities have been added to the StreamReport application to help the IT team share cloud services performance and usage information with internal customers. The IT administrator can use predefined report templates and create performance dashboards per business unit in a few clicks. Trends can be computed for capacity planning or to detect abnormal application behaviors. When generating PDF reports, open hours can also be taken into account to focus on only relevant statistics for the business.

Integrated per Session Back-in-time Troubleshooting Tools: A session history feature has been integrated into the centralized management to ease troubleshooting for any traditional or cloud-based application. In order to investigate a past event, these new tools provide back-in-time traffic auto-discovery, TopN and per session visibility. This feature takes advantage of Streamcore's DPI engine to auto-discover HTTP/HTTPS applications and to provide advanced information per session (e.g., response time, MOS, hostname/URL, SSL certificate).

Combined Bandwidth Control: When performance issues are caused by network congestion, Streamcore's integrated bandwidth management and behavior-based traffic prioritization mechanisms can be enabled to protect critical applications. In the 6.0 release, these mechanisms have been enriched to automatically manage competition between desktop video flows, and “time-of-day” policies have been added, in particular to change prioritization policies at night time or at the end of a month.

This 6.0 release also includes other improvements:

- New graphical user interface

- StreamMap enhancement to follow an application deployment per branch on a geographical map

- IPv6 traffic monitoring

- Branch appliances additional capabilities: asymmetrical web caching, LAN inventory

“This new release is the most ambitious Streamcore has ever released,” said Bertrand Vincens, Streamcore product manager. “Our customers will be able to experience a smooth transition towards IT-as-a-Service, especially in a hybrid cloud environment mixing public and private cloud services. Combined with our business-oriented approach, we have the most innovative solution on the market for enterprises that have embraced the cloud services model.”