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Riverbed SteelCentral vs. JDSUNetwork InstrumentsThe Riverbed SteelCentral network performance management suite of products provides considerable advantages over thoseof JDSU Network Instruments because of its breadth, depth and ease of use to quickly understand and pinpoint the root causeof performance problems.All things performance managementTrue performance management can be classified into three distinctareas: Network performance managementApplication performance managementEnd-user experience managementThe main strategic differentiation of Riverbed SteelCentral over JDSUNetwork Instruments is our ability to address all of the abovetechnologies within our portfolio. Only Riverbed SteelCentral canaddress all of the use cases and demands of IT in the performancemanagement arena. The legacy approach of mixing performance toolsfrom different venders simply continues the finger pointing cycle withinIT, and leaves users and the business to suffer.Gartner Magic Quadrant dominanceThe Riverbed SteelCentral solution is listed as a Leader in both theNetwork Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) and1Application Performance Management Magic Quadrants and is the onlyvendor that can claim that honor. While JDSU-NI also sits in theLeadership quadrant of the NPMD Magic Quadrant, Riverbed is listed tohave a superior vision and ability to execute.Gartner highlights Riverbed’s broad monitoring platform that provideshighly useful analytics for both network and application performance. Atthe same time, Gartner notes that JDSU-NI’s products are difficult touse and are over-reliant on physical device offerings, especially asvirtualization becomes ever more commonplace. Riverbed’s offeringscome in both physical and virtual form factors, offering wide flexibility indeployment options.RIVERBED ADVANTAGES Broadest portfolio in the industry;addresses all aspects of performancemanagement Riverbed Application PerformancePlatform delivers technology to diagnoseproblems as well as to cure them Understanding web page performance,not just object load times Visibility into Citrix, SDN and virtualizeddeployments Mobile device and cloud monitoring Leverages distributed packet capturewith Steelhead appliances and hostagents Sponsor of Wireshark, building atopuser's existing expertise WAN optimization friendly, requiring noextra hardware or configuration forreportingBreadth and depth of solutionSimply put, JDSU-NI lacks the breadth and depth required in today’s complex environments to adequately monitor andtroubleshoot application and network problems. The JDSU-NI solution misses major portion of the application infrastructure,1Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to selectonly those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization andshould not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, includingany warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.R1.3

with little to no understanding of application transactions, systems or application code. By missing visibility into these importantareas, it creates major blind spots when trying to understand the root cause of performance problems.SteelCentral uniquely combines end-user, application and network performance management into a single solution andworkflow, allowing users to seamlessly obtain a high-level view of performance and then drill into the relevant area for adeeper analysis.Figure 1. SteelCentral uniquely combines end-user, application and network performance management into a single solutionand workflow, allowing users to seamlessly obtain a high-level view of performance and then drill into the relevant area for adeeper analysis. The JDSU-NI solution misses major portion of the application infrastructure, with little to no understanding ofapplication transactions, systems or application code.Certain packets are more special than others While JDSU - NI may store a lot of packets, good luck finding the packets you are interested in to do diagnoses. Like finding aneedle in a haystack, sorting through terabytes of packets to find the ones of interest is not an easy task, and JSDU – NI doesnot make it much easier. The Riverbed SteelCentral solution automatically isolates the packets of interest by storing packetsassociated with SLA violations into a separate storage buffer, effectively giving the users 10x the amount of storage beyondthe standard rolling buffer. This buffer is called the Targeted Forensic Archive.Figure 2. SteelCentral AppResponse provides a separate archive buffer that enables you to keep critical alarm/forensic datalonger.2

It’s a Web page, how can you not know that?It’s a simple concept. A web page is the combination of numerous web objects. Text, graphics and on-demand web contentare each typically present numerous times across a given web page. Riverbed.com for example contains more than 20 webobjects, all of which combined represent the single home page.JDSU - NI does not understand the notion of a web page, and is only able to report on the network performance of individualobjects. SteelCentral understands both a page and its sub-objects. Performance can be reported and benchmarked at thepage level, the way users experience it, while triage can quickly show which objects are performing poorly.Figure 3. Riverbed monitors a web page and its objects. JDSU-NI can only monitor page objects. It does not understand whata web page is.I need to know where my problem is, now!When it comes to monitoring and diagnosing application or network problems, no other solution provides the same capabilityas Riverbed. Riverbed understand the end-user experience, and as it relates to web pages, can track the entire webexperience from the data center, browser and even on the backend. The SteelCentral solution can monitor actual user pageload times and highlight those that violate SLAs. It can then drill into an object level analysis for indivudal pages or users, andthen drill into the relevant packets or code-level trace for the affected user and immediately identify the root cause. This is allaccomplished with just a few mouse clicks. To top it off, SteelCentral can then provide predictive analysis to predict the impactof making the recommended changes.RIVERBED STEELCENTRALFigure 4. With JDSU-NI, this same analysis is impossible. As shown below, users will need to navigate among multiple GUI’sand products, and the solution will not identify a problematic user or web page response time, nor will it carve out theinteresting packets for analysis. Users will need to manually search through packets for interesting artifacts in hopes ofidentifying a culprit - resulting in painful root cause analysis.3

JDSU-Network InstrumentsFigure 5. With the Network Instruments solution, users need to navigate among multiple GUI’s and products and manuallycorrelate information.Speed accessing stored packets, manipulating large capture files and drilling down from dashboards to packets are critical.These are all real world situations that matter tremendously to operations teams. Riverbed is deployed in the world’s largestfinancials, government agencies, healthcare organizations, and learning institutions across more than 3,000 customers,precisely because workflow speed is so important.Capture packets anyplaceSometimes being instrumented in the data center isn’t the right place. Sometimes you need to see the packets as the enduser or the server is seeing them. Numerous situations demand this from performance problems to security forensics.Servers and end users - SteelCentral has capture agents available for PC, Mac and *NIX systems. These agents can beremotely controlled to stop and start captures, and the data can be encrypted and transmitted back to HQ for analysis.Riverbed Steelhead appliances - Users no longer need to purchase expensive dedicated hardware to perform packetcapture outside the datacenter; rather they can leverage their existing WAN optimization investments for both real-timevisibility and packet capture.JDSU-NI lacks flexibility in how and where to capture packets.Integration with Active Directory and switch port discoverySteelCentral integrates with Microsoft Active Directory to show which users, rather than IP numbers, have connected to aserver. SteelCentral also integrates with switches to show which physical port a client or server is plugged into. This data ispresented alongside IP addresses and application names, reducing operator burden and speeding time to resolution. JDSU-NIhas no similar integrations, and places the burden on operators to determine the relationships between network interfaces andkey business-level entities like servers and users.Software Defined NetworksSDN is transforming how network connectivity is provisioned and how traffic flows across those networks. While short time tovalue and cost savings driving rapid adoption, legacy monitoring tools such as those from JDSU-NI are unable to offertroubleshooting help. SteelCentral is at the forefront of these technologies, and understands VMware’s VXLAN and NSXenhanced flow data, as well as how to properly parse VXLAN and NSX encapsulated traffic on the wire.4