The Riverbed Blog

Riverbed @ EMC World 2012

W. Curtis Preston talks with Eric Carter, Senior Product Marketing Manager, at EMCWorld 2012.

 

 

 

Steelhead Habitat

It looks like Riverbed's "Steelhead" brand of WAN optimization products is not only for datacenters, branch offices, and mobile worker environments.  

Download Math (or, Predicting the Future)

One of our competitors is trying to stir up excitement because in two months there have been 10,000 downloads from their web site.

Now, what’s a little weird about that particular press release is that the same competitor was trying to stir up excitement just a few months ago with the news that in two months there had been 3,500 downloads from a different web site.

Someone sure is keen on announcing download counts! If the competitor continues on its current track, we can predict the next announcement in the series.  But first we need to figure out the growth rate.

• The first announcement was 3500 downloads in two months, a rate of 1750 downloads/month, in November 2011. 
• The second announcement was 10,000 downloads in two months, a rate of 5000 downloads/month, in April 2012. 

So we can calculate that in five months their download rate increased by 3250 downloads/month, for an average download acceleration of 650 downloads/(month**2).

Adding five months to April makes it September. So if the competitor stays on the same track, they will issue a press release in September touting that they have had 22,500 downloads in the previous two months.

These don’t seem like very impressive numbers to us, since as the corporate sponsor of Wireshark we’re familiar with Wireshark download rates. Wireshark is downloaded more than 500,000 times every month.

So when does this competitor get into the same league? At their current growth rate, this particular competitor will need to wait 692 months. That’s 57 years, 8 months. Mark your calendar now for December, 2069!

If you’d like to know more about why Wireshark gets more than 500K downloads per month, there's a great learning opportunity coming up in June: Sharkfest 12! You can register at http://sharkfest.wireshark.org/.

5 reasons why you should implement a cloud storage gateway

As data protection vendors improve their public cloud connectivity, some wonder if a cloud storage gateway is required within their backup infrastructure. The answer depends on the organization’s goals for increasing flexibility, reducing costs, and streamlining IT operations. But there are five benefits commonly cited by customers who've implemented cloud storage gateways:

1. Increased flexibility – Few data protection applications support the broad range of cloud storage providers offered by cloud storage gateways. Support for a broad range of vendors creates strong competition between cloud storage providers that lowers storage costs and benefits customers. Products such as the Riverbed® Whitewater® cloud storage gateway also support private cloud storage solutions such as EMC Atmos or systems-based on OpenStack, allowing the use of Whitewater gateways with public, private, and hybrid clouds. 
2. Reduced license fees – Most data protection vendors offer data protection licensing based on agent or capacity-based pricing models. Capacity-based pricing typically benefits organizations that require a large number of agents relative to the size of their storage pool. Many organizations find it beneficial to leverage a cloud storage gateway and simply purchase the required agents instead of adopting capacity licensing. As cloud storage gateways are typically priced on the size of the data stored after deduplication rather than the total number of terabytes protected, significant savings are realized.
3. Support for multiple data protection products – Many organizations run two or more data protection applications, a legacy backup application to protect physical servers, and another tasked with protecting the virtual machine infrastructure. While one or the other may be able to store data in the public cloud, it can be difficult to find multiple applications that support the same cloud storage provider. Cloud storage gateways can simultaneously accept data streams from multiple backup applications and store them in the same cloud account. Cloud storage gateways also provide the freedom to easily add new backup products while retaining the installed solution. The gateway essentially functions as a broker between all the backup applications and the cloud storage vendor. This allows organizations to implement the data protection applications that meet their needs today as well as the flexibility to quickly respond to changing business requirements.
4. Time to cloud – Often customers find that to leverage the cloud storage capabilities of their backup application, they're forced to upgrade their software and hardware, install additional software, and pay additional license fees. Installing a cloud storage gateway is a much faster path to cloud storage as the only change required is to update the storage target within the backup application to the address of the gateway appliance. No change to the backup schedule, jobs or policies is required. Whitewater cloud storage gateways are often installed and send data to the cloud in less than one hour.
5. Ease of use –The Whitewater cloud storage gateway appliance is purpose built for data protection and utilizes extremely advanced networking and storage technologies from Riverbed Technology that are proven in enterprise networks around the globe. Whitewater gateway has an easy-to-use graphical user interface and minimal administration requirements, providing substantial time savings.

To learn more about Whitewater cloud storage gateways and see how easy it is to implement with your existing data protection applications please visit www.riverbed.com/whitewater.   

Steelhead Cloud Accelerator - Live from Interop

Watch Miles Kelly of Riverbed Technology discuss Steelhead Cloud Accelerator, live from Interop 2012.  Steelhead Cloud Accelerator was nominated as a finalist for best of Interop 2012.

Link to video

Eating our own Dogfood

At Riverbed, we believe we're leading the move to Cloud. Over the last 3 years we've launched the Riverbed Cloud Portal, the Cloud Steelhead, Whitewater Cloud Storage Gateway, and the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator. These products help our customers reduce costs, and improve focus, by taking advantage of the economies-of-scale and specialization available in the Cloud.

But does Riverbed itself use the Cloud? We sure do! Early on we identified the need for our own production and test systems. We needed dedicated test Portals to deploy, license, and manage Cloud Steelheads. Other tests Portals are needed to help us develop and test the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator.

Eating our own Dogfood

How do we do this? The Riverbed Cloud Portal runs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, using many of the features provided by that system. We run all our test Portals up there too, and even optimize access to those Portals, from here in San Francisco, using a Cloud Steelhead.  Using the Cloud allows us to provision resources in a cost-effective manner, scale testing quickly, and eat our own Dogfood. As significant consumers of Cloud services, we believe this makes us better producers of equipment for Cloud Infrastructures

Building the Portal

How have we built the Riverbed Cloud Portal? It's built using the Python-based web framework Django, and uses the AWS Relational Database Service for the back-end. Reliability is very important since the Portal is a mission-critical component of many of Riverbed's next-generation solutions, so we put a lot of thought into load-balancing and redundancy. Riverbed used to be a company that just built clever network appliances. Now we're building web services, distributed systems, and Cloud Infrastructure technology. Sound like fun? Why not join us?

Interop 2012 - Riverbed customer DJO Global discusses Steelheads

Mark Kelly from DJO Global discusses using Riverbed Steelheads to consolidate their IT Infrastructure without having to increase network bandwidth.

 

 

Riverbed @ Interop

Viva Las Vegas: Riverbed at the General Dynamics C4 Systems (GDC4S) Conference Secure Communications and Computing User Conference and Training Event

Join Riverbed at the General Dynamics C4 Systems (GDC4S) Conference, which will take place May 23-24 at The Paris in Las Vegas, Nevada. Visit the Riverbed booth (booth #18) to learn about our performance solutions, which help overcome limitations inherent in C4ISR networking.  

Nick Yuran, business development manager at Riverbed, will present on the requirements and deployment models for tactical WAN optimization models, including virtualized environments and integration into cloud architecture.

Nick will focus on WAN optimization mobility solutions, and optimization of storage networking in a tactical environment. In Addition, Nick will highlight how the Riverbed performance platform provides a comprehensive, cross-layer solution to the networking performance requirements of the deployed warfighter.

The 15th annual General Dynamics User Conference & Training event provides military members and federal government employees with an opportunity to network with peers from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Attendees can participate in hands-on training and demonstrations on assurance, cyber security, and computing technologies. 

For more information about the conference visit http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=93b27f1a-f9da-413a-852c-4e42370bf09b&page=1

To learn about Riverbed solutions for governmental agencies visit http://www.riverbed.com/us/solutions/industry_solutions/government/

 

Interop 2012 - Gigamon partnership

Jim Berkman from Gigamon discusses Gigamon and how his company's products integrate with Riverbed's Cascade product family.