One-Box Appliance Designed by Riverbed and McAfee

McAfee, Inc. and Riverbed Technology announced a partnership that delivers a security and wide area network (WAN) optimization solution for organizations with remote offices. The one-box solution, which will include a virtual instance of McAfee Firewall Enterprise software running on the Riverbed Steelhead appliance, enables enterprises to deliver accelerated data and application access to users while protecting critical information and infrastructure from security threats.

The joining of forces between the leading WAN optimization provider and the world’s largest dedicated security company will help customers cost effectively address the distributed computing challenges associated with key IT initiatives such as server centralization, data center consolidation and a highly mobile workforce. Customers will realize immediate, tangible benefits and lower total cost of ownership through device consolidation, reduced operational complexity and lower business risk.

Riverbed WAN optimization solutions enable organizations of all sizes to overcome a wide range of IT and private cloud infrastructure performance bottlenecks, including poor application performance, slow database backups and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. By speeding the performance of applications between data centers, remote offices and mobile workers, in some cases by up to 100 times, the award-winning Riverbed Steelhead products enable companies to consolidate IT while improving staff productivity and collaboration.

The Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) is a virtualized, extensible data services platform integrated with the Steelhead appliance hardware that allows customers to deploy multiple best-of-breed edge services that formerly required dedicated servers. Customers can deploy virtualized applications, such as McAfee Firewall Enterprise software, directly on the RSP to further minimize the hardware infrastructure footprint at the branch office, thereby reducing operational overhead.

With McAfee Firewall Enterprise software, administrators can immediately begin to put firewall rules in the proper business context and take advantage of centralized firewall management, reporting and user-friendly rule creation capabilities. Additionally, McAfee Firewall Enterprise software offers unprecedented levels of threat protection such as VPN for secure site-to-site connectivity, anti-spam, URL and Web content filtering, encrypted traffic inspection, configurable application-level protection, and reputation-based global threat intelligence to block attacks before they occur.

"Riverbed’s customers are consolidating their IT infrastructure and moving data farther from users, which has negatively impacted the response times of business-critical applications. Our WAN optimization solutions help enterprises overcome these issues and deliver LAN-like application performance to distributed employees," said Venugopal Pai, vice president of alliances at Riverbed. "In addition to accelerating performance over the WAN, it is a logical extension to partner with companies like McAfee whose best-of-breed network security solutions are essential for a reliable distributed IT infrastructure."

"Customers are demanding simplified management and security that’s integrated into critical network infrastructure platforms, such as the Riverbed Steelhead appliance," said Dan Ryan, executive vice president and general manager of the Network Security business unit at McAfee. "By recognizing the eventual integration and overlap of security within the network environment, we are taking a proactive approach to offering customers a set of proven solutions that provide choice and flexibility in the marketplace. The coupling of the strengths of both companies is expected to deliver a set of solutions that customers can depend on to protect their most valuable data assets."

Availability
The joint solution is scheduled to be available in April.