Virtualization increasingly a part of data centres for all sizes of organizations.
So it should come as no surprise that VMware Inc.’s annual North American user conference – which is on this week in San Francisco – is not only a time for the company to make product announcements, but also an opportunity for its partners to look for a little limelight as well.
Riverbed Technology is one of them, and it made two announcements Monday as the conference began.
First, it said that its Stingray Traffic Manager, an application delivery controller and load balancer, is now integrated with VMware’s vFabric Application Director, a cloud application provisioning solution.
vFabric Application Director creates a blueprint to define all the pieces of a software stack in one package that will deliver a virtual application, explained David Greene, Riverbed’s chief marketing officer.
With the Stingray integration, a virtual or physical instance of Traffic Manager can be part of that blueprint. “That now means when I provision my application I can provision the load balancing capabilities and the application control capabilities at the same time as I provision the rest of the application stack.”
This will help software developers gain more control over the performance of applications, he said.
The solution is available through VMware’s Cloud Application Management Marketplace.
The second announcement relates to the emerging software-defined networks (SDN) technologies. Greene said Riverbed is working with VMware to extend its Cascade network performance management appliance to work on virtual LANs so it can trouble shoot.
“We will be the first product that is able to be used for performance trouble-shooting and error resolution of your vxLAN network,” Greene said.
Software-defined networks separate the control plane from the data plane in routers and switches, with the control plane implemented in software. It is expected to become increasingly important in virtualized data centres.
VMware, Cisco Systems Inc. and other vendors are working on vxLAN technologies.
