… And Evolves Steelhead With CX and EX

Riverbed Technology, Inc. is evolving its Steelhead product family, which is used by thousands of global organizations to accelerate the performance of applications over WAN.

             Steelhead CX

The company is introducing two new product series, Steelhead CX and Steelhead EX. The product families allow organizations to meet their IT performance priorities, from accelerating application performance worldwide to consolidating remote office infrastructure into the data center.

"In an effort to simplify management, increase resource utilization and reduce costs, organizations have been actively consolidating and virtualizing IT environments into centralized data centers," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "While these consolidation efforts provide numerous benefits, it is imperative that organizations ensure that these consolidated IT environments are adequately protected and available. Furthermore, these consolidation efforts can introduce inherent performance over distance challenges. Riverbed’s enhanced Steelhead product family enables organizations to centralize virtually all applications, driving down operational overhead and costs, yet still maintain high levels of availability and improve end-user satisfaction."

The Steelhead product family is powered by the Riverbed Operating System (RiOS) software, which solves application performance problems to overcome bandwidth and geographical limitations to improve productivity and enable global collaboration. Enterprises utilizing Riverbed WAN optimization have reduced bandwidth consumption by 65% to 95% and accelerated application performance from five to 50x, even up to 100x in some cases. RiOS on the new appliances delivers a broad set of optimizations that are easy to install and manage and provide price/performance.

"While working with thousands of global organizations over the years, we’ve recognized a natural market segmentation. There are IT organizations that want WAN optimization for its core function – to increase the performance of applications over the WAN for their distributed offices. There are other organizations that have a primary focus on consolidating their entire infrastructure," said Eric Wolford, executive vice president and GM, Products at Riverbed. "Our new high-performance product series meets the needs of both customer types."

Steelhead CX Series
Dedicated WAN Optimization Appliances
The Steelhead CX series, like its predecessors in the xx50 series, overcomes bandwidth and geographic limitations to make users more productive, data transfers faster, and applications perform seamlessly regardless of location. However, the Steelhead CX series of appliances offers more capacity and throughput than previous Steelhead appliances at the same total cost of ownership.

"Performance is paramount in our business. The speed at which our attorneys can access, modify and send documents is vital," said Sean Power, CIO at Lathrop and Gage. "I’m impressed by the evolution of the Steelhead product family; the new Steelhead appliances have more memory, processing power and throughput than previous models, as well as delivering RAID and dual power supplies as standard on each appliance. As Steelhead appliances have demonstrated their worth every day and cemented themselves into our network as key devices in our WAN performance strategy, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for from Riverbed."

Steelhead EX Series
Multi-function, Enterprise-class Branch Office Appliance
The Steelhead EX builds on Riverbed’s WAN optimization solution, and adds to that a platform with more memory, disk, and CPU to support the Virtual Services Platform (VSP) and Granite. And, every appliance in the Steelhead EX series is supported by SSDs.

Branch Office Consolidation
Every Steelhead EX appliance features the VSP, similar to the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) that runs on the xx50 series, which has a dedicated platform that runs virtual services and enables greater consolidation in branch offices. With the VSP, each appliance is designed to leverage VMware virtualization technology to run virtualized instances of an organization’s own services, including DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, print serving, streaming media, security service or 3rd party software.

Remote Server and Storage Consolidation
to the Data Center
The Steelhead EX series can also be upgraded to include Riverbed Granite. This new product enables a new architectural approach called edge virtual server infrastructure (edge-VSI) that does for edge servers what VDI did for desktops: it allows IT to consolidate and manage all edge servers in the data center. But unlike VDI, edge-VSI does this while delivering 20-50% lower TCO.

With Granite, enterprises can achieve complete consolidation of edge applications, servers and storage to the data center, while delivering services to the edge of the enterprise as if they were local. Edge-VSI is complementary to WAN optimization, accelerating performance for applications and use cases not addressed by any WAN optimization approach today. Organizations that deploy Granite are expected to save up to 50% over traditional approaches to managing distributed infrastructure by eliminating costly backup and recovery processes in remote locations, consolidating underutilized edge servers and storage, and cutting many of the general IT administration costs including travel associated with managing infrastructure at the edge.

More than 16,000 organizations worldwide depend on Riverbed to optimize and consolidate their IT infrastructure.

Steelhead-CX and Steelhead-EX series are expected to be available this quarter.