Riverbed Services Platform--Worth the upgrade

I recently had an interesting meeting with the CIO of a long-time Riverbed customer.  This customer had purchased their xx10 series Steelhead appliances years ago, in early 2005.  As has happened with many other Riverbed customers, these Steelhead appliances had become an integral part of their IT infrastructure, and their business could not function without them.  But after many years of dependable service, these older Steelheads models were soon going to be unsupportable because the hardware components were now so old that they were no longer available from Riverbed's suppliers.

While supremely happy with their Steelheads, the CIO was somewhat disappointed about having to upgrade their Steelheads in a difficult economic period.  But then the meeting progressed to to a discussion about the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP).

  

As we discussed the various software services and applications that can be hosted on RSP, the discussion brightened markedly.  RSP would allow this company to remove a significant number of servers that were locally hosted in their 30 branch offices.  While the original deployment of Steelhead 1010 appliances some four years ago had allowed the company to remove dozens of servers from their branch offices, there were still a number of servers in the branch offices needed to provide local file and print services for a number of specialized applications.  With RSP, these servers could now be removed as well from the branch offices, as the needed services could now be provided by Windows Server 2003 (which they already had licenses for) and other applications running on RSP.  It became quite apparent that RSP would add compelling value to the business and save significant amounts of money.  Not lost in the discussion was the fact that the new Steelhead 1050 appliance model would be needed anyway to replace the ancient Steelhead 1010 appliances, which did not have the hardware resources to support RSP.  But it was clear that the cost savings and efficiency improvements from RSP more than justified the investment in the new Steelhead appliances.

Because RSP is based on VMWare technology, its software virtualization capabilities have been proven in millions of implementations around the world.  Though Riverbed's VMWare-based capabilities were only recently available in RiOS 5.5 (released November 2008), this observation has provided enough confidence for many customers to quickly deploy it.  Already, I am aware of a number customers who have already deployed RSP to as many as 30-40 sites in their production networks.  Many others are now actively testing RSP in their labs.  Unlike competitive approaches such as Cisco's Windows on WAAS, which uses open-source KVM software, Riverbed's capabilities and deployment options extend beyond just Windows core server.  Some customers have been able to deploy additional applications on full versions of Windows hosted on RSP.  Others are using RSP to host Windows Media Server or Wowza Media Server for multimedia delivery, or Infoblox for IP address management. Still others have leveraged RSP to host their own in-house proprietary applications.  The flexibility and options provided by Riverbed through RSP are limitless.