Riverbed's Cascade, Stingray deal with next phase of optimisation

While the influx of undersea fibre cables into South and sub-Saharan Africa is having a positive impact on the quality of Internet connectivity infrastructure companies have access to, it's causing a veritable boom in business and consumer usage numbers across the continent.

The net effect, according to Pieter Engelbrecht, Riverbed product manager at Tarsus Technologies, is that the demands on connected enterprises' networking, server and storage infrastructure - both from an internal and external perspective - are on the increase.

"Managing this load manually is, quite frankly, not an option," Engelbrecht says.

"Not only does it require a substantial increase in IT staffers, those additional heads can, quite simply, not keep up with demands," he says.

"The best route to follow is to implement an automated network monitoring mechanism in concert with a solution that automatically optimises the network as issues occur, such as Riverbed's Cascade and Stingray product lines.

"Cascade monitors network performance by tracking dozens of key metrics, such as application throughput and response time," he explains.

"It learns the normal behaviour of applications on the network through a completely automatic, dynamic model, so IT doesn't need to set any hard-coded thresholds.

"Once a key application metric goes outside the normal range, Cascade sends an alert, allowing an administrator to then troubleshoot the problem by drilling down into the network information and take action," Engelbrecht says.

"Information from Cascade monitoring can then be fed into the Stingray traffic manager, which tunes and optimises a wide range of network-delivered applications for performance and stability," he continues.

"Core load balancing, session persistence and SSL decryption technology enable administrators to rapidly scale applications for improved capacity and availability.

"Administrators can even delve into advanced traffic optimisation in order to further improve performance and the end-user's experience.

"The two solutions work hand-in-glove to ensure the stability and performance of infrastructure is kept to a maximum, creating positive knock-on effects in the customer experience and satisfaction fronts," he says.

"And if Riverbed's credentials in the WAN space are anything to go on, customers can expect similarly fast returns on investment and massive cost reductions from the Cascade and Stingray product lines.

"We're extremely buoyed by the potential these products have to assist with the challenges the market is facing today and look forward to assisting resellers in gaining more visibility and traction for these solutions over the coming months," he concludes.