As you know, consolidation and virtualization are hot trends in IT. Businesses look to reduce costs while they increase their flexibility and efficiency in delivering services. The enhanced Riverbed® Services Platform (RSP) provides customers with the capability to run up to five additional services and applications virtually on VMware in a protected partition on the Steelhead® appliance.

RSP allows organizations to deploy local services in all their branch offices without deploying or maintaining full-blown servers to run the applications. Users can therefore minimize hardware at branch offices and consolidate IT operations to shave costs and simplify administration with no performance loss in local services.

As an option, the RSP can incorporate OPNET's ACE Live™ software for end-user experience monitoring and real-time network analytics. Running it on the organization’s Steelhead appliances can achieve startlingly enhanced application performance management in WAN-optimized environments with no additional equipment at the branch office.

OPNET's ACE Live provides monitoring, measurement, and detection of application performance violations. It supports complete visibility and reporting of all transactions and users, with detailed real-time and historical information about end-user response times, utilization, route quality, and ISP performance.
Using ACE Live with RSP, network admins will be able to:

• Continuously monitor end-to-end application performance over the WAN
  
  
• Automatically baseline performance and receive alarms when thresholds are violated
  
  
• Quantify the bandwidth reduction realized from Steelhead appliance deployments

End-User Experience Monitoring
ACE Live continuously monitors end-user application response times, providing real-time global visibility of all transactions and users across the enterprise via an appliance-based solution. The advanced real-time triage capabilities of ACE Live provide the ability to segment application response times into server, network, and application delays.

Application Component Monitoring
Another available option, ACE Panorama, continuously monitors performance-critical applications providing real-time component-level visibility across all servers in the application environment. Panorama tracks thousands of system and application metrics from the Java/.NET application server, web server, and database tiers.

Panorama’s powerful real-time correlation technology automatically consolidates metrics across multiple application tiers to rapidly identify root causes. Its unique instrumentation technology allows it to provide in-depth visibility into the performance of applications with minimal overhead in production environments.

End-to-End Transaction Analysis
Leveraging an embedded expert knowledge about network protocols and application behavior as seen from a network perspective, OPNET’s ACE Analyst delivers unprecedented in-depth transaction analysis. Panorama complements ACE Analyst by providing deep visibility into application internals, including Java and .NET components, classes, and methods.

Riverbed Steelhead appliances provide superior performance for mission-critical applications accessed by remote users. OPNET’s ACE Live monitors and troubleshoots the end-to-end performance of these applications. Using them together ensures that your network and applications will meet your users’ requirements.