Minimize the Risk of Datacenter Moves with Riverbed Cascade (formerly Mazu)

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

Riverbed Cascade combines network flow data already existing in an IT infrastructure with Network Behavior 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 the best approaches to monitoring, analysis, reporting, and alerting in one highly automated solution. Cascade incorporates advanced Network Behavior 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. 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.

Cascade's unique capabilities enable our customers to significantly streamline operational planning and troubleshooting workflows across multiple operations teams. The most common use cases include:

• Managing the WAN to accelerate business applications
• Assuring robust delivery of critical business applications
• Minimizing the risk of datacenter moves
• Reducing the cost of regulatory compliance

Cascade in Action

A national discount retailer was preparing to move 400 servers as part of a datacenter consolidation project. They had just received a bid for $70,000 from a systems integrator to provide an audit of those 400 servers to identify which applications were being hosted on which servers and what version of operating systems they were running. The systems integrator was proposing a refresh and update of all servers to the most current OS versions. An IT Director who used Cascade for performance analysis suggested they see if Cascade could provide the information they needed. The result, Cascade identified all application-server dependencies, as well as dependencies between servers, what switch ports those servers were connected to, and the optimal change windows with respect to service disruption. The user was not interested in OS versions because they were not contemplating a refresh as part of the consolidation. Savings = $70,000!