Riverbed has added a level service dashboard designed to give business executives a high-level view of how well applications are performing on the network.
With its WAN optimisation analytics platform Cascade 9.0, executives can drill down see if there performance problems that need immediate attention or build a historical view of their network to plan upgrades, the company says.
At the same time, the Riverbed has upgraded the RiOS operating system for its Steelhead WAN optimisation appliances. RiOS 6.5 includes application-specific optimisation for Microsoft Outlook Anywhere and SMB v2. The new version also includes optimisation for SSL certificate traffic for client machines and for protocols used by satellites.
The software makes it easier to configure QoS settings on Steelheads for customers who choose to use it rather than QoS on their routers. Customers rank their applications in importance, categorise each site by the bandwidth of their WAN connections and set minimum and maximum use for classes of activity. The QoS employs the hierarchical fair services curves algorithm.
The devices now take latency into consideration when determining how to handle individual applications. For example, if imposing deduplication on traffic would introduce excessive latency that would actually increase the time it takes for traffic to arrive, the device would skip it.
