Riverbed RIOS V6.1

Riverbed Technology announced version 6.1 of the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), which powers Riverbed’s award-winning wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions. With this release, Riverbed accelerates organizations’ pathway to the cloud by providing enhanced acceleration for cloud services and enterprise applications. These enhancements provide organizations more flexibility when determining the best approach for consolidating IT resources to public, private and hybrid cloud environments and ensure that organizations obtain maximum performance regardless of their network architecture.

Riverbed continues to deliver acceleration for the broadest range of applications and platforms of any WAN optimization vendor. RiOS 6.1 features new optimizations for Lotus Notes 8.5. In addition, the new version provides new optimizations for a range of Microsoft suites including Exchange 2010, SharePoint, and Microsoft Online for SharePoint and Exchange. Additionally, RiOS 6.1 delivers enhanced optimizations for disaster recovery (DR) performance, providing intelligent storage networking protocol enhancements to ensure better performance, greater scale and easier management for enterprises with large data center environments.

“With this release, Riverbed is providing its customers with the necessary tools to support critical IT initiatives such as private and public cloud computing, IT centralization and disaster recovery. As CIOs turn to centralized IT models to reduce costs, WAN optimization is an increasingly critical tool required to maintain performance and ensure that distant employees remain productive,” said Cindy Borovick, vice president at IDC.

Superior Application and Infrastructure Flexibility
Enhanced Optimization for Microsoft Applications
Many organizations have struggled with the performance of Microsoft Exchange over the WAN, forcing them to undergo the expensive and complex task of deploying Exchange servers at each remote office to support local users. RiOS 6.1 delivers enhanced latency optimization and data reduction improvements for both encrypted and unencrypted Exchange 2010 traffic, delivering data reductions up to 95%. By taking advantage of these features, organizations can efficiently deliver Exchange traffic over the WAN and, as a result, consolidate previously distributed Exchange servers back to the data center. In addition, as many organizations focus on upgrading to Exchange 2010, Riverbed is providing them with the ability to leverage their current investment in WAN optimization by ensuring superior application performance.

In addition to Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint has become a business-critical application as enterprises strive to improve productivity by sharing documents and information in a collaborative environment. New features in RiOS 6.1 extend Riverbed’s existing SharePoint optimizations, eliminating many of the performance issues encountered by remote users. RiOS 6.1 accelerates traffic at both the network layer and application layer and eliminates unnecessary round trips associated with SharePoint authentication requests, enabling Steelhead® appliances to deliver enhanced SharePoint optimization and reduce application latency and response times by up to 50 percent more than previous web acceleration found in RiOS.

Optimizing Applications in the Cloud
As organizations move to cloud environments for hosting data and applications, users become more separated from business-critical IT resources, and productivity often suffers because of poor application performance caused by latency and bandwidth limitations over the WAN. RiOS 6.1 addresses these issues for key business applications, enabling organizations to overcome the performance hurdles of moving to cloud environments. RiOS 6.1 optimizes both encrypted and unencrypted traffic for Exchange Online and provides Layer 7 application acceleration for SharePoint Online, ensuring enhanced performance for organizations leveraging Microsoft cloud-based services. Riverbed is the only WAN optimization vendor to provide enhanced acceleration and optimization for organizations using Microsoft Online for SharePoint and Exchange.

“The Riverbed Steelhead appliances have allowed International Justice Mission (IJM) to accelerate application performance – especially email and our centralized Intranet and training running on SharePoint. These are critical applications for training our employees working in the field and communicating about rescue missions,” said John Lax, Vice President of Information Systems at IJM. “We are very interested in Riverbed’s plans to accelerate Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010 in the newest version of RiOS. As we look into upgrading our IT infrastructure to the new Microsoft portfolio, having fast access to these new applications is critical to our mission.”

Enhanced Performance for Lotus Notes 8.5
In this new version of RiOS, Riverbed introduces the ability to optimize and accelerate encrypted traffic for Lotus Notes 8.5, making Riverbed the first WAN optimization vendor to optimize traffic for the latest release of Lotus Notes. This feature also provides latency optimization for Domino Server and Notes Client replication, making Riverbed the WAN optimization vendor with the broadest coverage for Domino and Lotus Notes replication use cases.

“As organizations continue to consolidate IT environments and explore cloud computing, they face performance challenges in connecting users over the WAN to business-critical applications and data. Riverbed’s advanced application- and network-level fluency provides our customers with substantially improved performance over other acceleration products, regardless of which network architecture they use, which applications they run, or where their data resides,” said Apurva Davé, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed.

Enhanced Disaster Recovery Performance
For organizations looking to accelerate replication traffic over the WAN, RiOS 6.1 delivers enhanced storage optimizations for DR initiatives by reducing DR traffic and accelerating replication times between data centers.

Enhanced storage networking optimizations
provided by Riverbed in RiOS 6.1 include:

EMC SRDF Optimizations – Riverbed customers that use EMC Symmetrix VMAX and Symmetrix DMX will benefit from improved data reduction and throughput due to the RiOS 6.1’s enhanced EMC SRDF optimization. RiOS 6.1 also offers a new auto-negotiate compression feature for EMC SRDF, enabling simplified management and increased availability.
FCIP Optimizations – RiOS 6.1 provides storage networking optimizations for FCIP traffic over Brocade 7500 and Cisco MDS gateways. These enhancements speed FCIP traffic to and across the network on both a protocol and a network level.

To optimize data protection, Riverbed has a number of partnerships with a variety of leading storage vendors, including Dell EqualLogic, Double-Take Software, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, NetApp and Symantec.

Lastly, RiOS 6.1 provides additional enhancements that provide high availability for branch office edge services and improved network resiliency.

RiOS 6.1 will be available this quarter.