Cascade Shark Frequently Asked Questions

The Cascade Shark appliance is a purpose-built packet capture and analysis platform running our Cascade Shark appliance software using the Riverbed TurboCap™ 1GbE or 10GbE network capture boards. The Cascade Shark appliance includes the Shark Packet Recorder, a customized packet capture application for high fidelity, multi-gigabit per second network traffic recording.

The Cascade Shark appliance is designed to provide full packet capture at GbE line speed with zero packet loss. The appliance captures, stores, and provides network data to the Cascade Pilot for visualization and analysis.

Cascade Pilot is a powerful network analysis tool with a visually-oriented user interface. It seamlessly and securely interfaces with one or more Cascade Shark appliances to display, drill down into, rewind, alert and report on, network traffic captured by the appliances.

No, Cascade Pilot is sold separately. Please read more about Cascade Pilot.

The best solution for your enterprise depends on your network data traffic and the amount of storage needed for real-time and retrospective analysis. The Cascade Shark appliance can be purchased in 1U, 2U, and 3U base unit configurations with 1GbE or 10GbE interfaces. These interfaces can be mixed/matched in the 2U and 3U models, while the 1U unit is available for 1GbE network environments only. Riverbed sales engineers can help to properly size and specify the appliance that is best for you.

Putting together a Cascade Shark appliance/Cascade Pilot solution is a simple 3-step process involving the selection of a Cascade Shark appliance base (1U, 2U, 3U), adding NIC cards (1GbE, 10GbE), and deciding how many Cascade Pilot licenses are required. Cascade Pilot licenses are single-seat licenses, so a license must be purchased for each user who need access to the Cascade Shark appliance(s).

Cascade Shark appliances are designed for placement at strategic points throughout your network that provide access to your mission-critical data. You need to use taps or configure span ports at these locations to ensure you have the visibility necessary for global monitoring and troubleshooting.

The Cascade Shark appliance includes a "dump-to-disk" facility called the Shark Packet Recorder which uses a new approach for dealing with high-speed and/or long-duration traffic capture scenarios. The Packet Recorder is based on an optimized packet data store that eliminates the need for file rotation schemes.

You can access an unlimited number of Cascade Shark appliances remotely from a single Windows-based laptop or PC running Cascade Pilot.

You can choose either a 10GbE or 1GbE NIC to add to your base Cascade Shark appliance configuration. You also have the option of mixing 1GbE and 10GbE interfaces in the same 2U or 3U Cascade Shark appliance base system. The 10GbE Riverbed TurboCap boards come with 10G fiber SFP+ Short Range (SR) or Long Range (LR) SFP+ transceivers.

The 1-GbE Riverbed TurboCap boards, currently, are 2-port or 4-port copper only. There is no fiber option.

The 3U Cascade Shark appliance has more hard drives = more spindles = more bandwidth to disk. The 3U appliance also has faster processors = more packets per second when computing live Views and indexes. Twice the memory = more space for packet buffers and data structures = less packet drops.