Big Switch and Riverbed Accelerate Pervasive Data Center Monitoring With Expanded Trial Offer

SANTA CLARA, CA–(Marketwired – May 26, 2016) –  Big Switch Networks®, the leader in bringing hyperscale-inspired networking to data centers worldwide, announced today a deepened partnership with Riverbed Technology, the application performance company, to provide end users with a cost-optimized application-aware network monitoring solution that delivers easy and efficient network and application troubleshooting. Big Switch and Riverbed will offer a free 90-day trial of the solution for network and security operations teams to test on-demand monitoring of any traffic, anywhere in the data center.

As data centers worldwide are seeing an increasing demand to monitor more of their network traffic, tapping or mirroring pervasively is paramount for comprehensive visibility, ensuring optimal network performance and granular security monitoring. The joint solution offers unprecedented scale for data center-wide monitoring, including east-west application-to-application traffic. Furthermore, customers realize unsurpassed benefits of having an operationally simple, and dramatically cost-optimized solution compared to traditional static proprietary hardware-based network packet broker solutions.

The solution couples Big Monitoring Fabric™ with the Riverbed SteelCentral NetExpress network performance management platform to deliver all-in-one network monitoring solution combining flow and packet collection and analysis for the entire data center. Specifically:

• Big Monitoring Fabric is a next-generation Network Packet Broker (NPB) that’s been designed from the ground up to build a pervasive visibility fabric that addresses the challenges of traditional box-based NPB solutions. Using an SDN-centric architecture, Big Monitoring Fabric delivers scale-out fabric to enable network-wide monitoring, with a single pane of glass for operational simplicity, and multi-tenancy for multiple IT teams (NetOps, DevOps, SecOps). Use cases include DC-wide 10G/40G/100G Traffic Monitoring, Remote DC/Branch Monitoring, and Centralized Tool Sharing.
• SteelCentral NetExpress is an all-in-one solution that combines advanced analytics and reporting, flow data collection, high-speed packet capture and SteelCentral Packet Analyzer software for fast, intuitive, graphical packet analysis. It helps minimize business disruption with top-down analysis that starts from the application and end-user perspective, and then drills down to the flow and packet level rather than the other way around. This approach lets you identify and solve problems in minutes instead of days or hours.

Key Solution Benefits Include:

• Flexible, scale-out deployment – Solution allows centralization of monitoring tools and staff, thus dramatically reducing costs while allowing operations to monitor networks across the organization.
• Massive operational simplicity – The solution is based on SDN architecture with a logically centralized, programmable controller that manages all switches, tenants and policies through single-pane control.
• Tremendous cost savings – Big Monitoring Fabric leverages commodity open networking switches with Switch Light OS that interacts with the Big Switch Controller to form the monitoring fabric, delivering feature parity with custom-ASIC based NPBs for 50% less.
• Multi-tenant tool and tap sharing – Multiple operations teams, each with its own SteelCentral tools, can monitor data center wide traffic. When several teams decide to monitor the same flow, Big Monitoring Fabric automatically replicates the flow and delivers it to the respective SteelCentral tools.

Big Switch and Riverbed are offering a free 90-day trial for prospective customers to evaluate the solution. To access the free trial: https://www.bigswitch.com/partners/riverbed-netexpress-big-monitoring-fabric

SUPPORTING QUOTES
“Together, Riverbed and Big Switch are providing end-to-end solutions that offer deep visibility and control to inspect, direct, and protect workloads for data center and private cloud environments,” said Katie Colbert, VP, Global Technology Alliances, at Riverbed. “With proprietary data center networks rapidly transitioning to open SDN fabrics, we see tremendous opportunity to accelerate customers’ demand for network and application performance monitoring by leveraging innovative software-centric architectures from Big Switch.”

“We are excited to announce our expanded partnership with Riverbed to enable data center wide monitoring for network performance and security. Both companies are focused on software innovations, leveraging standards-based hardware, to deliver next-generation data center monitoring solutions,” said Prashant Gandhi, VP of Product Management and Strategy at Big Switch Networks. “Together with Riverbed, we are enabling customers to deploy applications faster while driving down unnecessary network complexity and total cost of monitoring.”

HELPFUL MATERIALS

Customer Case Study Webinar: https://bigswitch.com/videos/webinar-intuit-riverbed-big-switch
Big Monitoring Fabric Web Page: https://www.bigswitch.com/sdn-products/sdn-products/big-monitoring-fabric
Riverbed/Big Switch Joint Webinar with Intuit: Discover How Intuit Leverages Next-Generation Performance Monitoring With Riverbed and Big Switch Networks
Solution Brief: Riverbed SteelCentral and Big Monitoring Fabric
Riverbed/Big Switch Joint Webinar: Riverbed & Big Switch: Application-aware network monitoring at scale with SDN fabrics
Riverbed Partner Page for Big Switch: https://www.riverbed.com/partners/find-a-partner/Big-Switch-Networks.html
Riverbed Blog: Here
Riverbed SteelCentral NetExpress Web Page: https://www.riverbed.com/products/steelcentral/network-performance-management/steelcentral-netexpress.html