New Capabilities for Riverbed Steelhead Mobile

Riverbed Technology announced new Steelhead Mobile capabilities that allow organizations of all sizes to deploy a cost-effective mobile WAN optimization solution with increased scalability, speed and simplicity. In this release, Riverbed is introducing Steelhead Mobile Controller-Virtual Edition (SMC-VE), increased capacity for the Steelhead Mobile Controller (SMC) appliance, and additional application-level latency optimization for Steelhead Mobile. Organizations from small-to-mid-size businesses (SMBs) to the largest global corporations can take advantage of these new features to provide their mobile workforce with LAN-like access to corporate files and applications.

"Productivity is a major challenge for mobile workers as companies embark on IT consolidation projects that result in workers being further from their data," said Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president at Yankee Group. "With many companies looking to expand the number of users that work remotely, it’s clear that a solution designed to optimize the performance of applications when a worker is mobile is critical. By expanding the scalability of its mobile WAN optimization solution, Riverbed is providing organizations of all sizes with the opportunity to give mobile and remote workers LAN-like access to corporate files and information and broadening its market reach."

Scalability: Empowering Organizations of Any Size
Mobile WAN optimization can help almost any company improve the performance of critical applications for remote workers while also significantly cutting corporate IT costs. For large Steelhead Mobile deployments and rapidly growing organizations, Riverbed already offers the Steelhead Mobile Controller appliance to allow IT managers to quickly and easily deploy Steelhead Mobile to all of their remote workers. To meet the needs of every size organization, Riverbed has expanded the scalability of its Steelhead Mobile solution, including the new SMC-VE and additional license capacity on the appliance, making its solutions available to a broader set of customers.

Steelhead Mobile Controller – Virtual Edition
Riverbed is introducing SMC-VE, which will make enterprise-grade acceleration more accessible to SMBs. In addition, larger organizations that have a small number of mobile workers will be able to implement cost effective deployments of Steelhead Mobile.

SMC-VE is a virtual package deployed on the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), a virtualized platform that resides on the Steelhead appliance that provides customers with the capability to run up to five additional services and applications in a protected partition on the Steelhead appliance. By running SMC-VE within the RSP, Riverbed offers enterprises the opportunity to obtain all of the same benefits of Steelhead Mobile while eliminating the need to purchase additional hardware. Enterprises can purchase as few as 10 initial Steelhead Mobile licenses, up to a total capacity of 100 licenses, and manage those concurrent licenses with SMC-VE running within the RSP to make it easier to cost-effectively target mobile users in environments where the additional scale of the SMC is unnecessary.

Steelhead Mobile Controller: Increased Capacity
In addition to reaching smaller organizations with the SMC-VE, Riverbed is increasing the total license capacity of the appliance-based SMC for the largest enterprises. The SMC is now capable of managing 2,000 additional licenses for a total of 4,000 licenses – no additional hardware is required. This will make the SMC the most scalable mobile WAN optimization solution available with 2x more scale than any other mobile offering.

"As people move to centralize their data and employees continuously move around the globe to conduct business, organizations of all sizes will be challenged with application latency and reduced employee productivity. We continue to enhance our WAN optimization solution to help companies overcome these specific challenges," said Alan Saldich, vice president of product marketing. "These enhancements are a direct result of interactions with customers who want to empower their mobile workforce but the size of their deployment requires a flexible approach and a broad product offering. These new Steelhead Mobile capabilities will allow us to provide both the smallest and largest companies with the ability to increase mobile worker productivity at a lower total cost of ownership."

Broadest Set of Application Acceleration
for Mobile Workers
Riverbed is also announcing support for application layer Lotus Notes acceleration for mobile users. Riverbed is the only vendor to provide this capability which improves the speed at which mobile employees can access large email attachments and manage calendaring, resulting in increased collaboration across dispersed geographical locations.

The Riverbed Lotus Notes acceleration was developed directly with IBM to optimize email, calendaring, and web, and can deliver performance gains of more than 18x. Riverbed introduced Lotus Notes application layer acceleration for remote offices in October 2008. With the introduction of Lotus Notes acceleration for mobile workers, Riverbed is the only vendor to deliver a complete Lotus Notes acceleration solution for both mobile and remote office workers.

SMC-VE and the above mentioned enhancements to Steelhead Mobile are expected to be generally available on Monday, July 27, 2009.