Riverbed Technology, the leader in application performance infrastructure announced new features to the Riverbed SteelCentral Network Planning and Configuration Management (NPCM) product family (formerly OPNET Network Engineering, Operations and Planning or NEOP). SteelCentral NPCM helps to ensure the availability of business-critical network services by detecting network device configuration errors before an outage in business-critical services. In addition, NPCM helps with security standards compliance by discovering and highlighting network configuration errors and differences.

“As performance troubleshooting teams know all too well, relying on out-of-date network change, topology and configuration data while keeping up with business-critical network and application obligations drives high IT operational costs and reduces staff productivity. Businesses need to prevent outages rather than troubleshoot them,” said Nik Koutsoukos, senior director, product marketing, SteelCentral at Riverbed. “SteelCentral Network Planning and Configuration Management solutions help overwhelmed IT staff keep their network in compliance with an ever-increasing number of regulatory, organisational and security policies. At the same time, the solution reduces outages due to misconfiguration by up to 70% using automated network configuration analysis instead of manual methods.”

“Riverbed’s Network Planning and Configuration Management solution provides us with a level of confidence when undergoing an audit. We are able to demonstrate that we have a reliable means to document, check and verify that the devices we introduce to our environment will not endanger our compliance profile. We haven’t had a device configuration failure resulting from any audit since we installed the Riverbed solution,” said a state and local government IT specialist in a June 2014 TechValidate survey.

“Staying ahead of network capacity, design and configuration issues has never been simple to achieve at enterprise scale. But simple planning and configuration monitoring tools are not enough – you need to align that activity directly with sustained monitoring, so that it’s possible to see the effect of changes as they happen. This is especially critical for the hybrid enterprise, which must deal with both on-premises applications and cloud-delivered services. Riverbed is taking this challenge head on, bringing together visibility and control within the NPCM family, with the aim of improved awareness, more effective incident response and better preventative practices,” said Jim Frey, vice president, Enterprise Management Associates.

SteelCentral Network Planning and Configuration Management

SteelCentral NetAuditor:

• Ensures the availability of business-critical network services by detecting network device configuration errors and preventing outages in business-critical services.
• 69% of TechValidate surveyed IT organizations using NetAuditor reported improved mean-time-to-resolution 3x or more after implementation.

SteelCentral NetPlanner:

• Helps plan for network resiliency despite network changes and growth.

• Creates a high-fidelity network model that combines multiple sources of data to deliver more accurate predictions of network behaviour and performance.

SteelCentral NetCollector:

• Reduces time and effort spent manually collecting and reconciling network data.
• Unique integration with Riverbed SteelHead, the world’s number one application acceleration solution, automatically detects and collects configuration and operational data and validates configurations to check for errors and violations.

Riverbed SteelCentral and the Riverbed Application Performance Platform

SteelCentral NPCM products are part of the Riverbed SteelCentral product family, recognized by Gartner as the only “Leader” in the Magic Quadrants for both Application Performance Monitoring (2013) and Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (2014). SteelCentral is the only performance management and control suite that combines user experience, application and network performance management to provide the visibility needed to diagnose and cure issues before end users notice a problem, call the help desk to complain or jump to another web site out of frustration. Riverbed SteelCentral is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform, the most complete platform to enable organizations to embrace location-independent computing, so that business objectives – not technical constraints – drive how applications and data are delivered.

Availability

The latest updates to the SteelCentral Network Planning and Configuration Management (NPCM) products are currently available. Existing customers can take advantage of the new product capabilities by trading up to the new NPCM products.