The Riverbed Blog

Boomerang – And I don’t mean the cartoon network

For those of you over 40, do you remember cartoon classics Johnny Quest and Speed Racer?  
They were, and still are, a couple of my favorites. Well, now you can see them on Boomerang, the cartoon network for us 40 and 50 somethings that have yet to grow up. We’ve borrowed creative use of the word Boomerang, but actually not in the cartoon network sense, but in the way that a growing number of Cisco WAAS and other competitive wins are coming back to us, just like a Boomerang does when thrown properly. If you are struggling with your technique, please see Eric Wolford.

Riverbed customers tell Network World readers what they think of Riverbed

Network World recently made a public request for Riverbed customers to share their experience with Riverbed's Steelhead product and the responses were nothing short of amazing. 

Here are some example quotes...enjoy!

 

In-path vs. Out-of-path deployment considerations

IT managers and network engineers who are new to Riverbed and WAN optimization in general are often apprehensive about placing new products and devices in the critical network path.  After all, if anything breaks or goes wrong in the WDS device, then all traffic to the WAN is potentially disrupted.

On the other hand deploying the new WAN optimization device in an out-of-path deployment, where it is configured as any application server or proxy would be configured, can create additional configuration complexity and hinder performance gains.  That is because the WAN router--or some other device that IS in the network path--becomes responsible for re-directing traffic to the WAN optimization device.

I decided in this blog to explore a few of the many considerations concerning in-path vs. out-of-path deployment of your WDS solution.  This blog is not to be a comprehensive evaluation of all issues, but hopefully, it will provide enough insights and understanding for those who are new to WDS, who are also wrestling with questions that others have waded through before.  Note that most of these considerations are vendor-neutral; they apply as much to Cisco WAAS, Blue Coat SGOS, or any other vendor's WDS products as they do to Riverbed's.

Top 10 Storage Inventions of All Time

Byte and Switch recently wrote about the top 10 storage inventions of all time and while I agree with most of the items on the list, they seem to have left off WAN optimization or Wide-area Data Services (WDS)!

Although data-deduplication is listed as #8, the context is with regards to data at rest and not data in flight.  This list item is obviously aimed at the specific impact that data-deduplication has on data that resides on the storage device.  There is a strong argument to be made that data-deduplication for data in-flight combined with the other performance optimizations that WDS provides has proven to be an important invention that impacts storage directly.  You might be asking how does WDS impact storage?

Can this WAN optimization solution scale?

It's a clear fact that not all WDS solutions can scale as necessary for deployment into large enterprise-scale networks with hundreds or thousands of sites and heavy traffic loads.  Though there are many WAN optimization vendors in the market promoting their products, some of those products are best confined to the test lab or to small production networks.  So what are the characteristics that distinguish those solutions that are capable of scaling for large-scale enterprise deployment?

In this blog I've compiled a short list of characteristics that that can provide hints on the scalability of any given WAN optimization solution. 

Data Security through WDS

Several recent events serve to highlight the importance of data security.  A short while ago Bank of New York Mellon Corp confirmed that a box of unencrypted data storage tapes that was lost by a third-party vendor responsible for transporting the data to an off-site facility.  The tapes contained the personal information of more than 4.5 million individuals.  Only a week later after the BoNY Mellon incident, State Street Bank confirmed the loss of the personal information of more than 45,000 employees and customers stored on disk.

Bogus WAN acceleration claims

Peter Sevcik and Rebecca Wetzel recently blogged on Network World about the bogus math and bogus acceleration claims that WAN acceleration vendors are making.  They make a pretty good point about the bad math being used in many cases to calculate what the X improvement is as a result of their acceleration product.  You can read about the math and suggested calculation to use here,  but the net-net is that they believe that vendors are mis-informing potential customers by making a 100X improvement look much more than a 10X improvement when it is actually closer than it appears.  They close by advising customers to ignore speed improvements above 5X and focus on more useful factors when evaluating WAN acceleration vendors.

While I agree to some extent their bad math claims, I believe they are mis-stating the importance of the performance improvement provided by WAN acceleration vendors.  At the end of the day, how important is improving the response time as close to LAN-like as possible?  Is it good enough that it is a bit faster?  I believe this largely depends on the application...