Riverbed and Keysight Help Pharmacy Benefit Manager Streamlines Operations to Help Control Healthcare Costs

Innovative healthcare providers help manage the cost of pharmaceuticals by finding new ways to reduce their own internal operations costs — without compromising the quality of patient care. One midwestern provider of pharmacy benefit management (PBM) services looked to reduce its monitoring costs and complexity while migrating to higher-capacity data centers. To fast-track the upgrade, the IT team chose to deploy a joint solution from Riverbed and Keysight to optimize visibility and monitoring.

Lowering Operations Costs Benefits Patients

The PBM company began evolving its data center network from a 10G to 40G infrastructure to improve service performance and reliability. The first step was to expand its use of Riverbed network and application performance monitoring solutions using Riverbed’s AppResponse packet capture, NetProfiler flow monitoring, and NetIM infrastructure management solutions.

Project leaders knew the newly modernized monitoring infrastructure would benefit from an upgrade of the network packet brokers (NPBs) used at multiple data centers. Migrating to its previous visibility vendor’s higher-capacity solution would have proved cost-prohibitive — and failed to deliver essential visibility functions — so the networking team asked Riverbed to recommend a more advanced, economical alternative.

Riverbed experts suggested they call Keysight to help increase monitoring capacity and efficiency while also lowering costs.

Deduplication directly impacts performance

The superior functionality Keysight’s Vision packet brokers provide includes the deduplication of redundant traffic packets in real time. “High-quality input data matters,” says Dan Sweeney, Strategic Account Manager, Riverbed. “Deduplicating traffic before it reaches the monitoring platform improves analytic efficiency, accelerates root-cause analysis, and ensures customers get greater value from their monitoring investment.”

Keysight Fills the Prescription for Delivering Analysis-ready Traffic at Scale

The Keysight visibility platform provides end-to-end speed, scale, and savings. The Vision 400 packet broker delivers greater functionality in a 1RU solution than the incumbent vendor’s 3RU solution — at less than half the cost. Other benefits include:

• Reliable delivery of network traffic to Riverbed for analysis
• Processing-intensive functions like deduplication happen in hardware at line rate — no dropped packets or performance tradeoffs
• Futureproofing the monitoring infrastructure to support additional data centers and cloud migration — the Vision 400 provides more than enough capacity to support migration of central and regional data centers to 40G, to the cloud, and whatever challenge comes next

“The customer found the Keysight solution to be faster and more elegant than the competitive approach, and they’re saving a bunch of money,” Sweeney says. “When you combine those two things, it really becomes a ‘slam-dunk’.”

What Next?

With network traffic, cyber threats, and expectations for a high-quality patient experience all intensifying, the next deployment of the new monitoring infrastructure at a secondary data center will feature Keysight’s advanced Vision Edge 50 packet brokers to aggregate traffic for processing by the Vision 400. In the end, the joint Riverbed-Keysight solution exceeded expectations to the point where the customer was able to extend and scale its AppResponse deployment more quickly.  

Together, Riverbed and Keysight continue to deliver the right fit for every use case and location. “I always want to recommend a tool that customers find good from a technical standpoint and also from a pricing standpoint,” Sweeney says. “This customer was definitely appreciative, so everybody wins.”