Case Study: Tiburon Associates achieves rapid diagnosis of months-long intermittent email outages and cuts resolution time to under a week with Riverbed SteelCentral

Riverbed SteelCentral Functionality Positively Determined the Cause of Several Month-Long Intermittent Email Problems in Only 15 Minutes

Tiburon Associates, a defense and federal-government consulting firm, was called in after a Tiburon client (code-named Wellfleet), with hundreds of remote offices, experienced random, intermittent email-client disconnects during an enterprise-wide email migration. The migration was paused for months as internal teams and outside consultants blamed the network (LAN/SAN/WAN) but could not identify a root cause, creating finger‑pointing and stalled progress.

Tiburon deployed Riverbed SteelCentral (NetProfiler, NetShark continuous packet capture and Packet Analyzer) to get holistic visibility; NetProfiler showed 120,000 server resets within hours and packet capture pinpointed a virtual software load‑balancer as the culprit. The evidence convinced stakeholders, the migration team fixed the issue and outages stopped, cutting mean time to resolution from months to under a week, improving collaboration and enabling “forensic fly‑away” kits that save an estimated $1M in annual travel costs.

Tiburon Associates

Larry Shabe

Systems Engineer and CEO