Microsoft and Riverbed forge OEM relationship

Riverbed recently announced a broadened relationship with Microsoft that results in Windows Server 2008 as an integrated option running within the RSP (Riverbed Services Platform) on Riverbed's Steelhead appliance.

This licensing agreement between Riverbed and Microsoft further solidifies Riverbed's position as the go-to WAN optimization vendor when it comes to helping organizations successfully perform branch office server consolidation projects. 

In this harsh economic climate when organizations are looking to cut costs in any way they can, server consolidation is an ideal way to reduce hardware costs, lower power consumption, and reduce costly management hours.  While consolidation makes obvious sense, undergoing complete consolidation where all servers are centralized at the data center is not possible for many.  There are services like domain controlling, print, and dns/dhcp that organizations want to keep local in a branch.  The result is that some servers must remain and that means that the solid cost savings benefit from consolidation isn't totally realized. 

While WAN optimization can help with the performance problems associated with consolidation, many WAN optimization vendors do nothing to help with the consolidation of these local services.  With Riverbed's licensing of Windows Server 2008, organizations can consolidate these branch office servers locally in the VMware equipped virtualization environment on the Steelhead appliance.  At the same time, Riverbed's Steelhead appliance addresses the performance problems when accessing those servers that have been centralized and consolidated to the data center.  Sounds like a no-brainer?  I agree!

I would like to hear from you on your plans for consolidation and whether the need to keep some services local has impacted you consolidation effort.  Maybe Riverbed can help!