Riverbed Adds to SteelCentral Network Portfolio

Application performance infrastructure provider Riverbed Technology (RVBD) announced several new upgrades to its Riverbed SteelCentral Network Planning and Configuration Management (NPCM) product family, giving users new tools to configure and monitor their network data.

New to the SteelCentral family are NetAuditor, which provides intelligent network configuration management; NetPlanner, which enables predictive, multi-layer network planning for hybrid architectures; and NetCollector, which supports NetAuditor and NetPlanner by providing real-time network data management across physical, logical and virtual network elements.

With the solutions, Riverbed customers will have deeper insight into their current network architectures, which should help reduce the time and effort spent manually collecting data from multiple sources to document the status, dependencies and configuration of their networks, according to the company.

“As performance troubleshooting teams around the world know all too well, relying on out-of-date network change, topology and configuration data while keeping up with business-critical network and application obligations, drives high IT operational costs and poor staff productivity,” said Nik Koutsoukos, senior director, Product Marketing at SteelCentral, in a statement. “It is much better for businesses to prevent outages rather than troubleshoot them. The updates to the SteelCentral NPCM products help overwhelmed IT staff deal with the challenge of keeping their network in compliance with an ever-increasing number of regulatory, organizational and security policies, while reducing outages due to misconfiguration by up to 70 percent using automated network configuration analysis instead of manual methods.”

Through SteelCentral NetCollector, customers will be able to utilize expanded support for Riverbed SteelHead, the company’s application acceleration solution, to help provide a clear view into the configuration of their SteelHead units. SteelCentral NetAuditor will help users to ensure the availability of their business-critical network services by detecting network device configuration errors and preventing outages, while SteelCentral NetPlanner helps users to plan for network resiliency in the face of network changes and growth, according to Riverbed.

All of Riverbed’s new SteelCentral Network Planning and Configuration Management products are available now. Earlier this week, Riverbed announced that it can now optimize Microsoft (MSFT) Azure workloads using the SteelHead CX. In May, the company introduced new product names for its entire portfolio to better describe their value and overall place in the Riverbed ecosystem.