© 2016 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved.

1

 Solution Brief

 

Riverbed solutions for:

Microsoft Azure Performance      Businesses are readily adopting the Microsoft Azure cloud platform for the advantages of convenience, scalability, and flexibility, among others. However, cloud application delivery models come with some of the same risks that traditional WAN models do: bandwidth constraints, latency, and competition for finite resources. In addition, there may be gaps or loss of performance visibility and control as applications traverse third-party infrastructure.  With many business-critical applications moving to public clouds, less than optimal performance is unacceptable. Only Riverbed offers an integrated solution for processing Azure application traffic to deliver the best experience for remote end users, while optimizing network resources and providing real-time visibility into the behavior of Azure application components.

Challenge When businesses move content and traditional application workloads such as Web servers, SharePoint applications, database repositories, and online storage to the Azure cloud, existing branch and data center network infrastructure and capacity may be degraded as traffic paths are re-aligned to the cloud. This is especially true for businesses that already have limited and constrained Internet connections. In addition, network latency becomes a problem as application traffic that used to traverse high-speed local networks is now directed to and from Azure over long distances with unpredictable switching and routing over the Internet.

Unfortunately, performance degradations are often due to network conditions that are shared and cannot be controlled by the end user or specific application environment. Azure has limited performance management capabilities outside of the Microsoft data center environment. Often Azure-based applications are integrated outside of the Azure cloud. In these cases it is crucial to be able to extend visibility to dependent on-premise, branch, or end-user application infrastructure.

Without complete end-to-end visibility it will be difficult to understand the complete performance picture and accurately troubleshoot performance issues around Azure-based applications.

 

© 2016 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved.

2

Solution Riverbed offers an integrated solution with best-of-breed capabilities required across various IT roles to provide visibility and control to Azure-based applications. The Riverbed Application Performance Platform™ delivers detailed performance information spanning many key performance indicators including a real-time detailed picture of the state of underlying components and end-user experience, as well as benchmarks of overall quality.

Visibility is coordinated with performance optimization capabilities that can manage a variety of network constraints such as available bandwidth and distance-based latency. This strength allows domain-specific IT operators to assure application performance without sacrificing the overall objectives of the business to streamline collaboration across IT teams.

Riverbed solution components provide broad value as they can run hosted in Azure infrastructure services as well as in the branch and data center infrastructure to ensure complete visibility and performance optimization.

Application and Network Infrastructure Visibility Riverbed SteelCentral™ provides continuous application traffic data collection and analysis to quickly understand application traffic composition and infrastructure performance while simultaneously providing insight into Azure application traffic patterns, session composition, bottlenecks and dependencies in the context of other applications.

End-User, Compute, and Transaction Behavior Analytics SteelCentral tracks end-user experience and collects application transaction and runtime information to provide deep insight on the consumption of application resources, end-user experience, and the interaction of service components and code triggered by application transactions.

With Riverbed SteelCentral, IT organizations can answer essential questions related to end user experience and Azure application performance such as:

• Who is impacted? Where are they located?

• What part of the application and which business functions were accessed prior to, during, and after a problem occurred?

• What was the state of all the underlying components before, during, and after a problem?

• What are the application’s component dependencies?

Application Traffic Performance Optimization Riverbed SteelHead™ solves performance issues between Azure cloud-based applications and remote sites. With SteelHead, IT organizations can:

• Reduce network delivery time to complete application data and transaction exchanges

• Deliver application traffic via optimal network paths based on availability, priority, and performance

• Streamline application transport protocols to reduce chattiness and increase efficiency over long distances to overcome network latency and transaction delays

• Prioritize and reserve bandwidth for critical application traffic over shared network links

• Maximize network capacity by optimizing utilization of network transport and eliminating delivery of duplicate data

• Speed the migration and accelerate access of these use cases:

• Azure Site Recovery • HTTP Optimization • SharePoint Farms Back-Up to Azure

 

 

© 2016 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved.

3

 Centralized and Standardized Storage in the Cloud For distributed branch and remote office environments, Riverbed SteelFusion™ together with Azure, provides a joint solution designed to eliminate the headaches of branch IT infrastructure, simplify and improve business continuity, and minimize business disruption in the event of an incident. This solution offers the ability to consolidate disparate server, storage, and network infrastructure into a single hyper-converged edge appliance at the remote sites while centralizing remote branch data into Azure without comprise of performance where it is needed most.

Deep Performance Expertise Enterprises worldwide rely on Riverbed Professional Services (RPS) when moving critical applications to the cloud and enhancing their performance.

• Craft migration plans based on live traffic, not outdated diagrams, with readiness assessments that combine application discovery, dependency mapping, and predictive performance analysis to minimize risks and bring more reliability to migration projects.

• Resolve performance issues as they surface during and after the migration with monitoring and troubleshooting services that observe networks, applications, and user experience – providing swift diagnosis of issues and recommendations for remediation.

• Continually fine-tune the performance of production applications delivered through Azure and optimize the end-user experience with regularly scheduled performance assessments.

Outcome With Riverbed solutions in place, Microsoft Azure customers can take advantage of a broad hybrid portfolio that supports customers throughout migration – from on-premise to the cloud; provision an optimized network connection to the cloud; and provide similar visibility and control of applications that they have in the data center. This will drive benefits across the company: to end-users with an optimized experience; line of business owners with improved applications; IT support and repair teams with detailed visibility and scale; and leveraging cloud storage.

Figure 1 SteelHead Application Traffic Performance Optimization

 

© 2016 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved.

4

With Riverbed and Azure, companies can get all of the benefits of the cloud while offering the control of the data center.

Learn More To learn more about how businesses can get detailed insight into application services, mitigate performance constraints and overall risk, visit www.riverbed.com/solutions.

About Riverbed Riverbed, at more than $1 billion in annual revenue, is the leader in application performance infrastructure, delivering the most complete platform for the hybrid enterprise to ensure applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues can be proactively detected and resolved before impacting business performance. Riverbed enables hybrid enterprises to transform application performance into a competitive advantage by maximizing employee productivity and leveraging IT to create new forms of operational agility. Riverbed’s 26,000+ customers include 97% of the Fortune 100 and 98% of the Forbes Global 100. Learn more at Riverbed.com.

©2016 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners. The trademarks and logos displayed herein may not be used without the prior written consent of Riverbed Technology or their respective owners. PM_MAP_US_011616