Hard and Soft Enhancements at Riverbed

Riverbed Technology, Inc. is introducing hardware appliance models and software enhancements to its Steelhead product family.

As part of this announcement, Riverbed is introducing new high-performance Steelhead CX appliance with SSDs and enhancements to its Steelhead Mobile client software and Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), the software that powers the Steelhead appliance.

The performance delivered by the new releases enables global enterprises to consolidate and scale their IT from the data center and the branch to mobile workers, and to realize the benefits of modern data center transformation.

"As data centers continue to evolve, organizations are looking to simplify IT operations, and improve end-user experience without adding cost and complexity," said Miles Kelly, senior director, product marketing at Riverbed. "These new Steelhead models and software enhancements better enable global enterprises to consolidate and scale while delivering a consistent end-user experience."

New Steelhead CX 5055 and CX 7055 appliance
The new Steelhead CX 5055 and CX 7055 model appliance are tuned for performance by combining new levels of bandwidth and TCP session scalability with SSDs. They scale to meet the performance, reliability and flexibility requirements of large enterprises, and allow them to more cost-effectively manage large-scale data center-to-data center replication, accelerate applications among many locations and users in an enterprise, and build large private cloud infrastructures. The new models result in an up to 50% increase in both WAN capacity and number of connections in a single appliance over the Steelhead 5050 and 7050, respectively.

Additionally, organizations can leverage the Riverbed Interceptor appliance to support up to one million connections to meet the requirements of the large most complex data center environments. This level of scale and reliability is a requirement for large-scale organizations that are virtualizing their infrastructure and consolidating their data centers into fewer regional locations.

Steelhead Mobile 4.0
The enhancements in Steelhead Mobile 4.0 simplify the management and provisioning of mobile users and devices while scaling to support up to 120,000 mobile users. It now offers end-to-end Kerberos authentication support used by Microsoft applications and platforms including Active directory and Windows Server, native optimization for SMBv2 traffic, and optimization for Outlook Anywhere. Additionally, with new clustering capabilities and an enhanced user interface in Steelhead Mobile Controller (SMC), enterprises have a simplified way to configure policies and can scale to meet the growing needs of an increasingly mobile workforce.

Fine-Grained QoS for VMware View Environments
Many organizations seeking to further extend the virtual edge are deploying VMware View to create a VDI. It offers a cost-effective way to manage end users in branch offices and streamline desktop and application management. However, inherent performance challenges with the WAN, including distance, latency, limited and costly bandwidth, and unforeseeable outages, can result in a poor experience for end users in VDI environments.

Building on the August 2011 announcement to partner with Teradici Corp. to better address IT infrastructure performance, in RiOS 8.0, Riverbed is offering QoS for PCoIP that delivers fine-grained control of VMware View virtual desktop traffic. The combination of WAN optimization and the ability to prioritize PCoIP at a granular level along with other traffic that traverses the same WAN helps organizations achieve the appropriate balance between desktop virtualization and business applications that traverse the same WAN.

New QoS Scalability Highlights
Riverbed Optimization System Version 8.0
In RiOS 8.0, Riverbed expands its integrated QoS capabilities 6-fold over previous versions of RiOS with the ability to scale automatic identification and prioritization to more than 600 applications.

Availability
RiOS 8.0, Steelhead Mobile 4.0, Steelhead CX 5055 appliance and Steelhead CX 7055 appliance are each expected to be available in Q4 2012.