Case Study: Boston College achieves faster troubleshooting and increased network visibility with Riverbed Cascade

Riverbed Cascade Enables Boston College to Stay Ahead of Growing Network Complexity

Boston College, a large Jesuit university in Newton, MA, was facing rapidly growing network complexity as multi-tiered, high-bandwidth applications and a three-tier Gigabit Ethernet campus network strained existing visibility and troubleshooting processes. The IT team lacked reliable layer 4–7 performance metrics and dependency maps, making it difficult to distinguish normal behavior from outages (for example, during a centralized email outage) and causing slow, reactive packet-capture-based troubleshooting.

After evaluating solutions, Boston College deployed Riverbed Cascade appliances in its data center to aggregate flow and application-level data from across the campus. Cascade was quick to implement and provided baselining, advanced search, automated health reports and alerts, and detailed metrics that reduced MTTR, increased uptime, and enabled faster root-cause identification—such as rapidly pinpointing vendor issues, detecting incorrect QoS tagging, and telling application problems from network failures—moving the team toward proactive management.

Boston College

Joe Harrington

Director, Network Services