Riverbed Unveils Its Roadmap

Riverbed Technology announced its product direction for accelerating the cloud for enterprises and government.

Building on its success in enabling organizations large and small to build private clouds, in 2010 Riverbed will begin to introduce solutions that extend the benefits of acceleration to applications and storage in the public cloud. First among these will be virtual Steelhead for the cloud, a new addition to Riverbed’s award-winning WAN optimization product family. At its publicly Webcast cloud launch event in New York City, Riverbed demonstrated the benefits of its upcoming virtual appliance for the public cloud. In addition, Riverbed unveiled and demonstrated new technology for the acceleration of cloud storage. Participating in the event with Riverbed were Amazon, AT&T, BT, IBM, Orange Business Services and Riverbed customer Lantmännen.

"For over five years we’ve delivered the market-leading solution for WAN optimization that overcomes the performance barrier to successfully consolidating IT infrastructure into private clouds," said Eric Wolford, senior vice president, marketing and business development at Riverbed. "These same performance issues also affect enterprises as they move to public clouds. With our forthcoming products we will help customers break the performance barrier for cloud applications and cloud storage, starting with virtual Steelhead for the cloud. We will help customers achieve the promised benefits of the public cloud, while ensuring the same high-performance access to applications and storage that they have come to expect from their Riverbed-accelerated private clouds."

‘The cloud’ is emerging at the convergence
of three major trends:

• service orientation, virtualization and further consolidation of IT infrastructure. Leading analysts define the cloud based on three models, including private data centers or private clouds;
• public, shared services or public clouds; and
• hybrid or virtual private clouds, which allow large enterprises and governments to benefit from the cost and operational advantages of public clouds while still providing control over critical assets.

Riverbed currently provides solutions for private clouds and has worked with many organizations to enable centralized and virtualized infrastructure. Companies that have built private clouds with Riverbed include Lantmännen, Rayonier, the Canadian Cancer Society, Constagny, Brook and Smith, and Simpson Strong-Tie.

Lantmännen, one of the largest food, energy and agricultural groups in the Nordic region, relies on Riverbed to ensure performance over private cloud infrastructure. "We are consolidating thousands of servers from hundreds of branch offices into two virtualized data centers. We selected Riverbed to ensure performance as we centralize applications, consolidate local servers and defer telecom spending across hundreds of sites. We expect to cut $6.5 million in overall IT infrastructure costs in one year, while improving overall IT infrastructure performance. Without Riverbed, it would have been impossible to roll out our private cloud initiatives without compromise."

Riverbed has developed technology that will broaden its cloud offerings to help enterprise and public sector customers address the performance issues that will occur as they embrace adoption of private, public and hybrid cloud models and their users move further from their data.

"High latency alone will limit the types of applications that can find a home in the cloud," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "Forcing new interfaces or rewriting applications to take advantage of the cloud will be another deal breaker for a lot of folks. If Riverbed can solve these issues the way they did for applications and data transfers on the WAN, they will open up the entire market. If I can think of the cloud the way I think about a disk drive today, the possibilities become truly endless."

Speeding Application Performance
The award-winning Riverbed Steelhead product family offers organizations of all sizes acceleration of applications and data regardless of location, including remote offices, private data centers and mobile workers. Today, Riverbed demonstrated virtual Steelhead for the cloud, which extends the benefits of Riverbed WAN optimization by accelerating the performance of applications and data transfers across private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures. The demonstration included installation of the product in Amazon AWS.

"Riverbed’s new virtual Steelhead for the cloud will be an important piece for cloud computing architectures," said Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president, Yankee Group. "The new solutions promise to overcome performance challenges, one of the key barriers to widespread cloud adoption."

Accelerating Cloud Storage
Many enterprises and governments see migration of storage to the cloud as an attractive option for cost and operational reasons. Storage needs are exploding and CIOs would like to make storage growth ‘someone else’s problem.’ However, concerns about performance, the need to rewrite applications, and fears about vendor lock-in could stall the movement of storage to the cloud.

"Cloud storage, while offering potential operational and cost benefits, has inherent latency issues," said Joe Skorupa, Research Vice President at Gartner, Inc. "Users should take appropriate measures to ensure that either the type of data stored in the cloud can withstand latency issues or that measures are in place to overcome these concerns."

Similar to how Riverbed addressed fundamental protocol inefficiencies for applications (used over the WAN) that resulted in order of magnitude performance gains, Riverbed unveiled at the event, advanced new technology that addresses fundamental protocol inefficiencies for block storage protocols that again produce order of magnitude performance gains over the WAN. What was deemed impossible before – running any block protocol over the WAN – was demonstrated to be possible. This new innovation enables thousands of miles of separation between storage and compute resources, transforming the WAN into a SAN (iSCSI).

"Our new technology will change the way enterprises and governments think about storage," said Wolford. "No longer will storage have to be tethered locally to the server. This frees IT leaders to locate and move storage assets to sites anywhere in the world, even thousands of miles away, to deliver the most cost-effective and intelligent architectures. This capability allows enterprises to bridge the public cloud and the private cloud – allowing them to take advantage of the best of both worlds."