Riverbed goes Virtual with VMware

One of the big news items of the day is the announced partnership between Riverbed and VMware and how Riverbed will be providing VMware's virtual platform as the base for running branch office services directly on Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead appliance.

Some of you may be asking why would I want to run services on a device that was designed to accelerate applications over the WAN?

The answer is simple  - Since shipping its first appliance in May 2004, over 4500 customers have deployed tens of thousands of appliances to branch office and data center environments around the globe. One of the key value propositions of Wide-area Data Services is the fact that servers can be consolidated from the branch office to the data center without impacting end user performance in the branch. The tremendous value of branch office server consolidation is clear. Get rid of those branch office file servers and mail servers and you dramatically reduce the cost involved in maintaining the servers not to mention the improved security and control now that the servers are in one location and not scattered about throughout your branch offices.

One of the challenges with server consolidation is that some functions just don't work very well remotely, even with WAN acceleration in place. Prime examples are IP address management with DNS/DHCP and active directory or domain controller services for systems access and authentication.

With the VMware integration, Riverbed is leveraging the available real estate in the Steelhead appliance fabric and with the help of VMware, is creating a virtual protected zone where services like the previously mentioned can be installed. Customers now have the opportunity to leverage a single appliance footprint for WAN optimization, print serving, dns/dhcp, and just about any branch office service that you can think of.

Think "branch office box". For some reason I like the ring to that acronym "BOB" :)

Seriously though, how does this differ from what other vendors are doing or have done in the past? The key here is that Riverbed's strategy is to not compete with vendors that provide services like IP address management or security. Riverbed's strategy is to focus on what it does best, which is WAN optimization and partner with vendors that provide best-of-breed services for branch offices.

The winner at the end of the day is the customer who gets best of breed WAN optimization plus best of breed branch office services all contained within an elegant appliance footprint at the branch. In contrast to other vendors that have mediocre WAN optimization + mediocre branch office capabilities like security.

Furthermore, this announcement extends the great synergies that exist between Riverbed and VMware where many of Riverbed's customers are enjoying dramatic acceleration (up to 55 times faster) of VMware environments as it pertains to moving virtual machine images for disaster recovery operations or desktop virtualization activities.

Comments

[Mead]

From a customer perspective and as a warning to other customers. I understand the purpose of this but moving server level application things such as dns, dhcp, cifs, etc to the a Riverbed just shifts support to your WAN staff instead of your server staff.. something to think about before just doing this.