blogs.riverbed.com

5 things to look for when choosing a WAN optimization vendor

I recently blogged about the ABCD's of WAN optimization in an attempt to simplify the understanding of how this technology adds value to IT organizations.  After hopefully gaining a better understanding of WAN optimization, the obvious next step is to choose which WAN optimization vendor's product to deploy.  As Riverbed's evangelist, I am obviously biased, but I thought I would plot out what I see as the 5 key things to look for when selecting a WAN optimization vendor.

1.  Customer and industry recognition

Customer references remain king regardless of the product, technology, or service.  We see this with social media platforms like Yelp where the community shares their experience with a variety of businesses.  If a large percentage of the community rates the business highly, then there is a better chance that your experience will be positive as well.  The same holds true for WAN optimization.  Ask your vendor candidates to provide several customers that you can call to ask how their experience has been.  Even better, ask for references that represent an environment similar to your own.  Be wary of vendors that only have a small amount of references or simply provide you with case studies in lieu of someone that can accept a phone call.

In addition to customers, talk to industry experts to get their take.  For example, Gartner is one of the premiere analysts that covers the WAN optimization market.  They publish a Magic Quadrant spotlighting leaders and visionaries in this market.  These industry experts have done their homework and while their opinion is at the end of the day, just an opinion, it is an expert opinion.

2.  Proven ROI

Value and return on investment is cornerstone to any technology deployed in today's economic landscape.  Ask each vendor to go through an ROI exercise based on your environment in order to determine what the potential savings would be.  While the product cost varies from vendor to vendor, so does the ROI once you figure in the deployment costs, optimization results, and cost of the product as well.  It is also a good idea to ask for both customer and 3rd party ROI validation.  Beware of products that are considerably less as the old adage "you get what you paid for" often applies.

3.  Speed, Scalability, Simplicity

At the end of the day, it's usually about speed\acceleration\optimization.  How much acceleration do you get with each WAN optimization vendor?  Many vendors will tout acceleration for varying applications, but vendors differ in their implementation.  Look for vendors that have developed acceleration techniques geared towards mitigating the latency impact on the performance for your specific application. 

WAN optimization encompasses IT infrastructure technology that is often deployed as an appliances (hardware/virtual) at a branch office and data center and software that is deployed in mobile worker's laptops.  Scalability of this IT infrastructure as far as being able to address the demands of your user, network, and application loads is critical for very large deployments where there are large amounts of users and branch offices.  Being able to scale down can be very critical as well.  If you have small offices with only a handful of users, does the WAN optimization vendor offer a product specifically designed for your environment?

One of the often overlooked comparison points of WAN optimization is simplicity.  How simple is the product to deploy?  How much IT staff is required for the initial deployment and ongoing maintenance?  test each vendor by timing how long it takes from un-boxing to optimization.

4.  Product Features and Breadth of Capabilities

You may be surprised that product features is this far down on the list.  The truth is that once you test for speed, scalability, and simplicity, the product features usually take second stage.  For example, if your application is SSL-encrypted, vendors that have developed SSL acceleration features should rise to the top during your testing.  Vendor acceleration features in the areas of web-based apps to Lotus Notes optimization to thin client acceleration vary greatly as do their ability to accelerate these applications. Beware of vendors that claim acceleration of an application only to find out they they don't solve the latency impact on performance.  Once again, make sure your applications are part of your WAN optimization test plans.

There are features very applicable to WAN optimization that are not necessarily about optimization or acceleration specifically.  For example, the ability to provide end-to-end visibility into the network and applications is important for both identifying additional opportunities for optimization along with monitoring the effectiveness of the WAN optimization devices themselves.  Some vendors offer a robust visibility solution while others are well behind in this important aspect of WAN optimization.

Another feature to look for is the ability to run branch office services such as domain controller, print, DNS/DHCP directly from a WAN optimization device.  A number of vendors provide a virtualization layer where you can run these services on their box, providing the ability to consolidate a number of servers and appliances at the branch.  Think branch office box functionality.

5.  Company Viability and ability to Support

Last, but certainly not least is the viability of the vendor and their ability to adequately support their product.  A WAN optimization solution can be a big investment with great value and a tremendous ROI, but your investment could be a bad one if you choose a vendor on the way down, instead of up.  Is the vendor's business growing or shrinking?  Do they have ample resources to focus on your success after the sale?  If you are a global company, do they provide global support?

If you would like to hear from me specifically about Riverbed's response to each of the above five points, please respond and let me know.  I would also love to hear your feedback and if there is maybe something I missed.

Bob Gilbert
bob@riverbed.com

La Porte Regional Health Systems deploys Riverbed to optimize medical imaging

La Porte Regional Health Systems selected Riverbed Steelhead appliances to optimize CIFS and GE PACS files from a remote hospital and a diagnostic center. Added benefit to running Steelheads is their nightly remote backups went from 4 hours down to 10 minutes.

Global Clinical Research firm reduces 72% data over the WAN with Riverbed

Riverbed customer able to optimize Notes and replicate a Domino database data in real-time. This customer continues its consolidation project by deploying the Riverbed Services Platform to its branch offices.

Is Cisco still trying to eat their own dogfood? I thought they had given up...

Cisco first began selling WAN optimization in 2004.  Over the 5+ years that they have been aggressively promoting and selling the WAFS/WAAS product to their loyal customers, Cisco has been unwilling or unable to use WAAS themselves, in their own network.

The discrepancy between Cisco's words and actions must have been uncomfortable, because in 2008 Cisco finally made formal plans to deploy WAAS in their own network infrastructure.  These plans were documented in a WAAS progress report posted on Cisco's website in 2008.  An excerpt from page 6 of this document states the following:

Cisco has approximately 300 global offices that have less than 45 Mbps bandwidth.  Cisco partner IBM will deploy Cisco WAAS in these offices during the remainder of fiscal year 2008 and part of fiscal year 2009.

2008 and 2009 passed, and there was still no sign of an operational WAAS deployment in Cisco's own network.  I wrote my first dogfood blog in June 2009, wondering how they could sell WAAS without using it themselves.  Larry Chaffin similarly asked in his Network World blog ("Could the Rumors be true about Cisco?  They don't use WAAS in their own network?").  No response from Cisco, except for a few muddled references to "pilot testing" in some of their branch office sites.  Cisco even refused to comment on the progress of their WAAS deployment when confronted at their Cisco Live! conference.  The internal WAAS deployment effort apparently was not going according to plan.

At this point, I thought Cisco had given up on their WAAS deployment, just as many of Cisco's former WAAS customers have.  But unlike former WAAS customers, Cisco's IT department is probably not allowed to turn to Riverbed.  Then I saw a new blog, dated 25 January 2010, on Cisco's website:

http://blogs.cisco.com/ciscoit/comments/cisco_internal_waas_implementation/

The internal Cisco WAAS implementation continues to  expand broadly . So far IT has deployed WAAS to 200 Cisco remote offices worldwide.  When fully deployed over the next six months, we will have implemented WAAS in approximately 300 Cisco offices and eight data centers worldwide.

Here we go again.  Years after Cisco's previous aborted attempts to deploy WAAS, it seems Cisco is going to make another concerted effort to deploy it.  But Cisco's blog also raises even more unanswered questions, such as:

1)  The blog states that 200 WAAS devices have been deployed in Cisco's branch offices, but none seem to be deployed in Cisco's data centers.  What good is WAAS if they aren't optimizing network traffic to the data centers, where the majority of their application servers are located?  (and of course, the data centers are where the WAAS per-peer data store experiences severe scaling problems...) Are these "deployed" WAAS devices doing little other than optimizing a small amount of regional traffic?

2)  If Cisco's branch offices have less than 45Mbps of WAN bandwidth as documented in Cisco's 2008 WAAS progress report, then why are they primarily deploying the WAE-674 to these offices?  The WAE-674 is rated by Cisco for 90Mbps of WAN bandwidth, so why isn't Cisco using more of the smaller and more cost-effective WAVE models?  Does Cisco lack confidence in the performance specs published in their own WAAS data sheets?  Is Cisco internally aware of a WAAS performance or scaling issue that isn't reflected in their product documentation?

3)  Cisco's blog boasts about their hopes of saving $850,000 over 3 years from their 300-site WAAS deployment, as a result of consolidating servers and storage.  $850K over 3 years???  That's hardly impressive when you consider how Riverbed customer Lantmannen expects to save $60 million over five years after deploying the Steelhead solution to 300 sites.  Furthermore, note that a single WAE-674 appliance with the WoW virtual blade enabled costs $28,500 at list price.  300 of these deployed to Cisco's branch offices amount to $8.55 million.  Even at a 50% discount, Cisco's branch deployment would amount to spending $4.275 million dollars in order to save $850,000 over three years.  After adding a few additional million dollars to the bill for the data center WAAS devices, you end up with a hugely negative ROI.

Clearly, Cisco is not attempting to deploy WAAS for the ROI, which is hugely negative (even after Cisco's 85% discount for internal transfer pricing), but to convince their concerned customers that they can eat their own dogfood.  We wish Cisco luck on their renewed WAAS deployment efforts; perhaps they will get farther than their previous attempts. But of course, if this upcoming deployment effort doesn't work either, they can always write another new blog about planning to deploy WAAS in 2012...

Will Cisco ever catch up to Riverbed?

It’s no secret that WAAS lacks many features and capabilities offered by the market-leading Riverbed product.  But Cisco continuously justifies the purchase of their less-capable WAAS product by promising to customers that the next software release will resolve all of WAAS's problems and bugs, and finally be the "Riverbed killer."  And this reasoning sometimes works; many customers have suffered with WAAS--often for years--because of the expectation that "Cisco will catch up to Riverbed.” But now times are changing--many are starting to wonder if Cisco can ever execute on these promises.

 

Cisco's promises to deliver a "Riverbed killer" now date back some five years; WAAS is not a new product.  Rather, WAAS has a history that dates back to March of 2000, almost ten years ago when it was originally created as a file caching device called ActaStor.  That product was purchased by Cisco in 2004, and eventually re-named WAAS.  Through the five-year timeframe that Cisco has owned and developed WAAS, the product has been subjected to a rushed and chaotic development environment.  There was intense pressure on Cisco’s developers to quickly introduce the new features needed to “catch up to Riverbed,” and this naturally spawned numerous bugs and other software problems that have plagued WAAS, and caused a number of serious difficulties for Cisco’s early WAAS customers.

 

As software professionals know, an emphasis on quick feature releases and short-term fixes eventually undercuts itself as the overall product becomes hard to understand, modify, and support. Today’s WAAS product appears to be afflicted with extremely complex underlying software, primarily resulting from WAAS’s rushed development environment.   Due to its complexity, in recent years a pattern developed—every time Cisco released new WAAS features and capabilities, there would be a deluge of newly created bugs in that software release.  This was the case with a number of WAAS 4.0 releases, as well as the more recent WAAS 4.1.1 and 4.1.3 releases.  Even Cisco’s own product documentation reveals that WAAS 4.1.3 was delivered to customers with more known bugs than any previous version of WAAS software.

 

Bug problems in Cisco WAAS have become such an issue that the most recent WAAS software release—version 4.1.5—introduces no major new capabilities beyond a number of minor features that are essentially bug fixes.  It seems that WAAS release 4.1.5 is purely devoted to fixing existing problems found in the earlier WAAS software releases.  It has now been nearly a year since Cisco last released a major new feature for WAAS--SSL optimization--and that feature was delivered several months late.  While Riverbed was adding a raft of new features and capabilities in latest RiOS 5.5 and 6.0 software releases, Cisco has had to effectively suspend new WAAS feature development for the past year to focus on bug fixes. 

 

If historic patterns from the past five years of WAAS product development continue, WAAS customers can expect two things from Cisco’s future WAAS development efforts:  1) a deluge of bugs with any new WAAS software release containing major new features, and 2) long waiting periods to resolve those bugs before the new software features can be used in a production environment.

No one can tell the future; perhaps Cisco’s claims of catching up to Riverbed may still come true.  However, given the complexities that seem to exist deeply within the WAAS product, I believe that outcome is unlikely.  While individual bugs can be fixed, the underlying conditions that cause bugs in the WAAS product are much more difficult to address.  These are fundamental, long-term problems that have evolved over years, which possibly can only be fixed by starting over from scratch, through a compete re-write of the WAAS software.  Not only is there a wide gap in existing product capabilities, but WAAS’s underlying software is now so complex that adding new features and capabilities takes significantly more time, effort and development resources.  As a result, many observers have come to the conclusion that the most likely future scenario is that Cisco’s WAAS will continue to fall further behind Riverbed in product capabilities.

WAN optimization, Chinese Food, and Virtualized WOCs

 
 
Selecting a WAN optimization vendor is a lot like choosing a Chinese restaurant to eat at.  We all have certain expectations about Chinese food; we know what it's supposed to taste like, and we all expect to enjoy the food that we order.  Every Chinese restaurant will claim to meet these expectations and deliver the best quality Chinese food.  But unfortunately, most of us have had at least a few disappointing experiences where the restaurant fails to deliver the quality and taste that we expect.  For myself, I am particularly wary of Chinese restaurants that advertise an "all-you-can-eat" lunch special for $4.99.

In a similar way when enterprises look for a WAN optimization solution, they have certain expectations around obtaining LAN-like performance over their WAN, 90% data reduction, 6-month ROI, and being able to centralize their application servers into their data centers.  Most WAN optimization vendors claim to deliver the same capabilities as the market-leading Riverbed solution, but for a cheaper price.  But the unfortunate reality is that cheaper WAN optimization products usually fail to meet these expectations, especially for larger deployments.  As with Chinese food, just about the only reliable way to make the right choice to get a reference from someone who has deployed that solution before you.  All too many of us have found out the hard way that the advertised $4.99 lunch special does not consistently lead to good or even adequate-quality Chinese food.

The San Francisco Bay Area where I live is crowded with Chinese restaurants; it's a very competitive market.  To differentiate themselves, some Chinese restaurants in my area offer delivery service.  You don't need to physically go to the restaurant to get their product--the food will be virtually delivered to you after you order it online or over the phone.  Would you order from a restaurant that offers a virtual delivery service?  Of course, that decision would depend on the quality of the product that they offer.  If I had a bad experience with a specific restaurant while dining-in, then it certainly wouldn't matter to me if they offered delivery service or not...there's no way I would order food from that restaurant again with or without the delivery service.

In a similar way, there has been some discussion about the benefits and convenience of virtualized WOC products, including in a Network World article by Jim Metzler.  Jim makes a good point about the advantages of having the vendor deliver the product to you in a software-only virtual package...you don't have to physically take delivery of WOC hardware in order to obtain the product and its benefits.  Riverbed understands the advantages of a virtual software WOC that runs on any brand of server hardware, and has already announced the future availability of a virtualized Steelhead product.

But a key point missing from Jim's article is that any virtualized WOC is only as good as the underlying product and technology.  If the original physical WOC product exhibits issues and problems when running in your network environment, then why would the outcome be any different when using the virtualized software version of that same product?  Just as I would not order using the deliver service from a Chinese restaurant where the food does not fit my pallet, enterprises should not purchase virtualized WOC products from vendors where the original physical WOC doesn't work for their environment.

The ABCD's of WAN Optimization

What is the first thing you think of when the term "WAN optimization" is discussed?  Believe it or not, the majority of IT professionals continue to associate WAN optimization technology solely to environments where bandwidth challenges exist.  While optimizing bandwidth is indeed one of the key value propositions of WAN optimization, there are a number of additional core value propositions that in many cases present an even higher value than bandwidth savings alone.

What are these areas that WAN optimization impacts?  Instead of going down the confusing path of going over the specific areas in detail, I'll try to make it as simple as ABC or in this case, ABCD.  A for Application Acceleration, B for Bandwidth Optimization, C for Consolidation, and D for Disaster Recovery.

Application Acceleration

Let's face it.  Most business applications have been developed with the local area network in mind.  Applications ranging from Exchange to Lotus Notes to web-based applications like SharePoint, SAP, or Oracle all perform well when clients access servers over a low latency, high bandwidth LAN.  The challenge is that as soon as you extend these applications to the WAN or increase the distance between the client and the server, application performance is poor and in some cases, up to 100 times slower.  Operations that took seconds now take minutes.  The ability to provide LAN-like performance for applications that branch office and mobile workers rely on is arguably the cornerstone value proposition of WAN optimization.   

Bandwidth Optimization

As I mentioned previously, overcoming bandwidth challenges continues to be one of the key reasons to deploy WAN optimization.  Contrary to popular belief, bandwidth is not free and in fact can be very expensive.  WAN optimization essentially eliminates all the data redundancy and the result is that between 65% to 95% of traffic is eliminated from WANs.  The result is that congested links become uncongested, smaller links perform as if they were bigger, and the need to upgrade bandwidth is deferred or eliminated altogether.  Very simple to understand ROI.

Consolidation / Cloud Computing

We have seen the pendulum swing from a centralized IT infrastructure during the 70s and 80's with central mainframes to a massive build out of a distributed IT infrastructure during the 90's where 6 million plus branch offices have been equipped with local servers.  Over the past decade or so there has been a big move back to the centralized, consolidated model where organizations want to simplify their IT and cut costs by consolidating expensive to manage branch office equipment to central data centers.  Relatively recently, we are also seeing an increased interest in moving from this private cloud data center centralized environment to a public cloud environment where infrastructure is hosted by 3rd party vendors like Amazon, Microsoft, etc.  While consolidation obviously makes sense, the challenge is performance.  When you move your file servers, mail servers, and app servers thousands of miles away from your users, performance takes a beating.  WAN optimization becomes vitamin or or the pain killer for consolidation projects.  As a vitamin, WAN optimization is the essential enabler for projects where consolidation has yet to take place.  Replace branch office servers with a WAN optimization device and users in most cases won't notice a difference, even though their server is now removed from their LAN to a data center that is thousands of miles away.  WAN optimization can also be the pain killer for organizations that have already consolidated, but have performance issues.  WAN optimization is essential for the success of any consolidation project.

Disaster Recovery

One of the often misunderstood values of WAN optimization is the impact on disaster recovery and business continuity.  The value is quite simple to understand.  WAN optimization dramatically reduces the time it takes to perform data backup operations either between the branch office and the data center or between primary and backup data centers.   For example, SnapMirror operations are in many cases 30 to 50 times faster.  Operations that take 30 hours to replicate terabytes of data can be reduced to just a couple of hours.  The impact here is that organizations that are having a hard time meeting their RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) need WAN optimization.  Shorter backup and recovery times combined with the fact that you can perform backup and replication operations more often, results in a much better RTO and RPO.

There you have it.  Understanding the true value of WAN Optimization is as easy as ABCD.  Thanks to Andy Rogerson at Riverbed for coming up with this clever methodology for remembering how WAN optimization impacts IT initiatives.  I would also like to add that not all WAN optimization products are the same.  Riverbed is widely recognized as the market leader with a best of breed WAN optimization suite that has been deployed by more than 7000 customers to address application acceleration, bandwidth optimization, consolidation, and disaster recovery initiatives.

Cloud security concerns

News of China's reported attempts to hack Google email accounts highlights the security-related risks and exposures of cloud computing.  Google's own perspectives on their experiences can be found here on Google SVP David Drummond's blog:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

Though Google's complaints about international cyber-attacks are currently front-page news, the reality is that thousands of other similar attacks on public computing infrastructures occur on a daily basis.

Certainly, computer security has always been an issue since the advent of the transistor.  But as computing infrastructures have grown increasingly interconnected through networking technologies, best practices and enabling technologies have always emerged to contain the associated security risks.  In this sense cloud computing is only the latest stage in the ongoing internetworking and consolidation of disparate computing infrastructures.  Accordingly, the advent of a new generation of security challenges should not be a surprise.  It would be a mistake to simply dismiss cloud computing opportunities because of the potential for new security risks. 

Large numbers of Riverbed customers have been able to realize a private cloud computing infrastructure by using Steelhead WAN optimization to consolidate their IT infrastructure into a smaller number of data centers.  But the case of these Riverbed customers, most believe that their security has improved as a result of their consolidation practices, because their data is now centralized and consolidated into a smaller number of hardened, secure data center facilities, rather than be scattered throughout various regional or branch offices each with varying security standards.

A private cloud infrastructure only hosts data in private data center facilities that are reliably protected by established firewall, VPN, IDS/IPS, and other security technologies and best practices.  For those enterprises that view the public cloud as in their future, the adoption of private cloud infrastructures in the interim can smooth the transition to and adoption of the public cloud.  For those enterprises where security concerns and business practices don't make the public cloud feasible, a private cloud will deliver many of the efficiencies and benefits of a shared IT infrastructure without many of the security risks.

"...so what's the story with Blue Coat?"

I recently met with the CIO of a large Riverbed customer.  During the course of our meeting, the CIO mentioned to me how an analyst firm had recommended to him that they look at Blue Coat for WAN optimization.  Though they are a happy Riverbed customer, he was curious enough to accept some Blue Coat devices into their lab for testing and evaluation.  What his team observed was a very complex and difficult-to-configure Blue Coat product that significantly underperformed Riverbed.

The CIO gave me a puzzled look and asked, "so what's the story with Blue Coat???"  The analyst had told him that they were the "market leader" in WAN optimization, but according to his team who had tested them, Blue Coat's products were essentially unusable for their network, at least for WAN optimization.  I am aware of a number of other customers who were disappointed--even angry--with their poor, sometimes-disastrous experiences with Blue Coat WAN optimization functionality.

Blue Coat is widely known as a security vendor, but they have made some startling claims about being the "market leader" in the WAN optimization. At least one analyst firm has believed these claims, which belie recent events surrounding Blue Coat as a company, such as:

1)  Recent layoffs of at least 10% of Blue Coat's existing employees -- It seems counter-intuitive that a "market leader" would be laying off employees just as the economy is coming out of a recession.  I would think that most market leaders would be hiring in order to maintain their leadership position during an economic recovery.

2)  Blue Coat moving 50 high-tech jobs to India -- Blue Coat seems to be obsessed with cutting costs instead of expanding their product leadership.  Tragically, Blue Coat rewards the US employees who engineered their supposedly "market leading" WAN optimization products by moving their jobs overseas.  Perhaps the real reason for the cost cutting is because Blue Coat's WAN optimization capabilities just aren't achieving satisfactory levels of customer acceptance.

3)  Blue Coat's mandatory shut-down and vacation time for all employees in December -- The WAN optimization market is very competitive.  But isn't Blue Coat jeopardizing their "leadership" by taking a break in a very competitive race?  If you were leading a highly-competitive marathon race, would you stop to take a coffee break?

4)  Blue Coat's 1% revenue growth in the latest quarterly financial report -- Unusual for a "market leader," Blue Coat's financial performance is anemic compared to most other high-tech companies.  And this was during a quarter in which the US economy experienced 2.8% growth, according to the US Commerce Department.

5)  Blue Coat's CEO disclosing that pure WAN optimization represents "less than a couple percent of overall product revenues." -- Blue Coat is the leader in WAN optimization, even though pure WAN optimization represents a very small part of Blue Coat's business.  Hmmm...something doesn't sound quite right with that statement...

The real story behind Blue Coat is that in 2006, they made ambitious plans to enter the WAN optimization market.  To spin their story and convince the market of their supposed leadership, Blue Coat uses sophisticated language such as "the Application Delivery Network (ADN)," terms that are meaningless to a hands-on IT professional, but impressive-sounding to casual observers.  But unfortunately for Blue Coat, the actual implementation of the WAN optimization features in their repurposed security product is a failure, and doesn't come close to achieving the eminence anticipated by their marketing team.  While Blue Coat maintains a healthy amount of business in their core security market, it appears their investments in WAN optimization have not panned-out, hence the need for cost-cutting.  What is now becoming evident is the disconnect between their marketing spin, and the reality of their failed WAN optimization efforts.

The Perfect Holiday Gift for the Citrix Lover: Steelhead Appliances

Dear Santa,

 

I have been a good user all year (except the photo-copier incident at the Annual Party, which I’m sure we’d all like to forget) and I think you probably have some end-of-year budget.  Anyway, if you and the IT elves could please review and give me the following, I’d be the happiest worker ever.  I want:

 

- Citrix to be much faster (it takes way too long now)

- Quicker download/upload of files

- Speedy applications

- More bandwidth

- A Red Ryder carbine-action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock.

 

Yours,

Joe User

 

Well, I’m sure you’ve received many similar holiday helpdesk requests already.  Good news, Riverbed is here to make the holidays happy for Citrix customers everywhere!

 

With RiOS 6.0, Steelhead appliances can easily optimize the WAN for Citrix ICA – up to 40% faster response times and 83% bandwidth reduction. Many Citrix customers have struggled with performance across the WAN, impacting end user acceptance and productivity.  Riverbed now has simplified configuration and enhanced QoS capabilities for Citrix delivering both bandwidth reduction and up to 40% better response times.  Just contact your local Riverbed team to order in time for the big day.

 

As for the Red Ryder air rifle, well, I’m sure your users would just shoot their eyes out, so better give them the Steelhead appliances for Citrix instead.

 

Best wishes for the holidays!