New Riverbed Steelhead WAN Appliance

Riverbed Technology, Inc. has extended its Steelhead WAN optimization product family with the addition of a new hardware appliance and upgrades to its Steelhead software.

Steelhead WAN optimization solutions can now accelerate a range of enterprise infrastructures while expanding IT control and ease of management, including smaller branch offices, cloud infrastructures, SAAS applications, and locations served by hybrid networks. These enhancements make the Steelhead WAN optimization product family a more critical part of delivering application performance across the entire business and extends the commitment from Riverbed to deliver acceleration everywhere.

The enhancements include version 8.5 of the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), the software that powers Steelhead WAN optimization solutions, and the new hardware appliance, the Steelhead CX 255 series appliance.

Path selection, a new feature in RiOS 8.5, simplifies the management of hybrid MPLS and Internet networks while delivering performance. New application optimizations extend the Steelhead appliance’s lead in delivering a set of optimizations for applications important to business. Integration with Riverbed Cascade Profiler software, an application-aware network performance management solution, helps IT managers meet application SLAs. These enhancements and additions to the Steelhead product family allow IT organizations to more cost-effectively give end users across the organization the performance they need while maintaining control and minimizing complexity.

"It is critical for us to rapidly adopt new technologies that help us to reduce costs, boost productivity, and enhance collaboration," said Ray Sirois, director of IT, at Wright-Pierce, provider of water, wastewater, and infrastructure engineering services. "By delivering accelerated performance cost efficiently across our entire infrastructure, Riverbed WAN optimization is at the heart of our ability to improve both the way and pace that our employees work."

IT organizations face demands from their end users for access and speed, regardless of device or location, yet must still manage the network efficiently and securely. With their set of application optimizations and deployment options, ease of installation and management, and now the ability to manage multiple access methods with path selection, Riverbed WAN optimization solutions are positioned to allow businesses to manage these complex IT environments.

"Network architects should revise WAN architectures to improve performance for external cloud applications and resources. While Internet VPNs and Ethernet services will play a greater role in the enterprise WAN over the next two to four years, it will largely be as part of a hybrid network, blended with MPLS service to ensure delivery of the performance, availability, and feature functionality that businesses desire," noted Gartner analysts Andrew Lerner and Neil Rickard.

Path Selection Delivers Enhanced Control
for Acceleration Everywhere
Rapid adoption of cloud applications, rich media and distributed business-critical applications has complicated network traffic delivery. The network is evolving to a hybrid architecture combining the strengths of a highly reliable MPLS network with the ubiquity, price, and speed of the Internet.

With the introduction of path selection in RiOS 8.5, IT organizations can cost effectively deploy and manage complex hybrid networks to deliver greater application reliability and performance to users anywhere. Path selection combined with application identification via deep packet inspection (DPI) enables IT and business units to understand usage and performance down to the specific application type and to dynamically reroute application flows in case of performance degradation. Path selection ensures the right path and service level for each application with no impact to end user experience. With integrated QoS and now path selection, Riverbed WAN optimization solutions provides IT organizations with the ability to control network consumption, prioritizing mission-critical and latency-sensitive applications, while minimizing utilization by recreational traffic.

"As we are delivering a growing mix of centralized and cloud applications to our distributed employees, our WAN is becoming increasingly strained. Riverbed WAN optimization will allow us to successfully move to a hybrid architecture and take advantage of lower cost Internet networks. In the end, we will be able to deliver the performance our end users need, reduce the complexity and burden on the WAN and still maintain control of our IT infrastructure," added Sirois.

Optimizations for Business-Critical Applications
With this release of RiOS 8.5, Riverbed strengthens the technology partnerships with Microsoft Corp. and NetApp, Inc. for mutual customers.

RiOS 8.5 is introducing new optimizations for business-critical Microsoft applications and environments including SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013, Office365 and file sharing applications that utilize the server message block 3 (SMB3) protocol in Windows 8 and Server 2012 environments. As a result, mutual customers of Microsoft and Riverbed can increase productivity and efficiency, while enhancing business resilience.

"SharePoint is vital to our success and Riverbed WAN optimization has played a critical role in enabling our distributed employees to be productive and collaborative," said Kurt Anderson, CIO, GeoEngineers, Inc., a multi-disciplined earth science and technology firm that offers a diverse suite of services. "With the new SharePoint 2013 optimization that Riverbed is introducing, we will be able to take advantage of the new features in SharePoint, which is a strategic part of our continued success and growth."

With storage intelligent optimization for NetApp SnapMirror, IT organizations can now efficiently prioritize and deliver data replication to ensure BC and rapid DR of critical data. Customers can obtain detailed insights into each storage volume and prioritize replication for the most important data sets while avoiding taxing resources on processing data that will see little benefit. Combined with previous optimizations for replication, data protection goals can be more easily met across the enterprise.

Integrated WAN Optimization Solution
With Application and Network Visibility
The integration of Cascade Profiler 10.0.7 with RiOS 8.5 extends application-aware network performance management capabilities by integrating DPI capabilities within CascadeFlow data from Steelhead WAN optimization solution deployments. With detailed application level profiles, decision makers get accurate and deep application and network visibility to identify and characterize traffic flows across the network and among branch offices. This capability enables organizations to identify, prioritize, fine tune QoS parameters and route business-critical applications and non-essential web traffic. The integrated solution combinesWAN optimization with QoS, path selection and application-aware network performance management capabilities, resulting in unprecedented control.

Steelhead CX255 Appliance delivers
enterprise WAN optimization to small branch offices
With the introduction of Steelhead CX 255 series appliance, the infrastructure IT team can bring performance and enterprise WAN optimization cost-effectively to every branch office, including small branch offices, while delivering the best experience. With up to 6Mb/s bandwidth capacity, the Steelhead CX 255 series appliance has tripled the through-put capacity over the previous Steelhead CX 150 and CX 250 appliance series and provides organizations with a small branch office solution that offers the same benefits found in larger Steelhead WAN optimization solutions, including decreasing bandwidth utilization by up to 98% and improving application acceleration up to 100 times faster.

RiOS 8.5, Cascade Profiler 10.0.7 and the Steelhead CX series 255 appliances are expected to be available in 3Q13.