Riverbed Steelhead Mobile 3.0

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced upcoming enhancements to its Mobile WAN optimization solution to address the productivity challenges global organizations face when managing remote and mobile workforces.

Riverbed Steelhead Mobile increases employee productivity while on the road, working from home or connected wirelessly in the office by providing application performance improvements. With this release, Riverbed will provide acceleration for Windows 7 and 64-bit systems for mobile end users. In addition, organizations will be able to take advantage of improved flexibility and simplified management functionality to provide mobile workers with accelerated performance no matter where they are working throughout the world.

"As companies focus on consolidating their data through private cloud initiatives, the distance between their employees and critical data is growing – employees are becoming more mobile, working from a variety of locations outside of the office. This means that as centralization of data and IT infrastructure continues, remote access is becoming more of a challenge," said Eric Wolford, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Riverbed. "With Steelhead Mobile 3.0, we are able to deliver to customers a solution that not only accelerates important Windows 7 and 64-bit applications while on the road, but also complements their broader Steelhead appliance deployment."

"Riverbed’s leadership in the WAN optimization market can be attributed to product innovation and focus on creating a comprehensive WAN optimization solution. The company has maintained a focus on customer priorities and ever-changing IT requirements," said Cindy Borovick, research vice president at IDC. "Enterprise IT departments are being pressed to improve IT efficiency and employee productivity with a reduced IT budget. As more companies move forward with IT consolidation projects to cut costs, performance for end users is a concern. Mobile WAN optimization can help overcome this challenge by improving the performance of critical enterprise applications for remote and mobile workers."

Steelhead Mobile 3.0 introduces enhancements that allow organizations to provide their mobile workers with better access and performance, eliminating slow performance as a barrier to mobility.

Accelerate Windows 7 and 64-bit Systems
for Mobile Users
Riverbed continues to deepen its optimization of Windows and other Microsoft applications, such as SharePoint, Office, Server and CRM, so that enterprises can provide accelerated access to and improved performance of Microsoft applications to remote and mobile workers. With Steelhead Mobile 3.0, Riverbed provides acceleration benefits to Windows 7 and 64-bit systems.

Organizations will have the ability to support Microsoft’s catalog of modern operating systems and advanced platforms. Through Riverbed’s comprehensive solution, companies will have the flexibility to upgrade operating systems or migrate to platforms while obtaining consistent application performance.

Web Applications – Up to 60X Faster
Enterprises are utilizing HTTP and HTTPS for everything from e-commerce to mission-critical applications. They are the underlying protocols for all Web-based applications used to communicate internally with employees and externally with partners and customers. By optimizing these protocols, users can dramatically reduce the amount of data that they need to send over the WAN, while at the same time streamlining the chatty behavior of transport and application protocols. With Mobile 3.0, as with the Steelhead appliances, these benefits are extended further to the application layer for HTTP and HTTPS users to make Web applications even faster while maintaining the preferred enterprise trust model. The common architecture of the Steelhead appliance and Steelhead Mobile gives organizations a single comprehensive solution to increase the performance of key Web-based applications.

By employing URL learning, page parsing, embedded object pre-fetching and metadata acceleration modes, Steelhead Mobile further reduces the chattiness and delays that plague enterprise Web-based applications. With these additional tools, business-critical applications used today such as SharePoint, intranet portals and Web-based document management systems, as well as Web-enabled ERP and CRM applications like SAP NetWeaver, JD Edwards and Siebel, all receive application acceleration of up to 60x.

Branch Warming – Immediate Acceleration
Regardless of Location
Riverbed has extended its technological leadership by improving integration with the Steelhead appliance, allowing workers to take advantage of even more of the benefits of the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) while working remotely.

With Steelhead Mobile 3.0, Riverbed introduces Branch Warming, which allows mobile and branch office users to share optimized data and experience even greater overall acceleration. By sharing the data references between the data stores of the Steelhead Mobile client and the branch office Steelhead appliance, mobile workers not only take advantage of all of the optimization benefits of the Steelhead appliance but are also able to contribute data references from their data store to help improve performance for the entire branch office, enabling ‘warm’ performance regardless of location.

Dancker, Sellew & Douglas has approximately 40 users that have benefited from the acceleration capabilities of Steelhead Mobile for the past two years. "With Mobile 3.0 we are experiencing the same stellar acceleration that our team has grown accustomed to – for example, I have a user working in a remote office in East Syracuse that is experiencing 67% data reduction and 3X performance gains," said Michael Vassallo, Senior Network Administrator. "We’ve found that the new Branch Warming feature helps our users switch seamlessly from working wirelessly to connecting back to a branch office with a Steelhead appliance. It greatly improves efficiency."

Steelhead Mobile 3.0 is expected to be generally available on December 2, 2009.