The Riverbed Blog

Riverbed interview about cloud computing product direction

Bob Gilbert and Eric Wolford discuss cloud computing and Riverbed's recent announcement regarding a product direction for accelerating cloud environments.

Eliminate Help Desk Headaches: Emile Rashkovich of Sentinel Real Estate

Learn how Emile Rashkovich of Sentinel Real Estate eliminated help desk calls by improving application performance with Steelhead Appliances. 

How is virtualization like Walmart?

Riverbed Senior Director of Product Marketing discusses how virtualization is like Walmart and how Riverbed can help from his Interop New York presentation earlier today. 

Customer Testimonials at Interop New York

Join us for an exciting final day InterOp New York!  In addition to the product demonstrations that are taking place throughout the day a number of our customers will be joining us to share their experiences with you in our main presentation theater.  Don't miss this opportunity to see our products in action and to hear how some of the worlds leading organizations are relying on Riverbed to improve the performance of their IT infrastructure.

Interop New York Schedule: Thursday 19 November

11:45a	Customer Speaker:  Rockford Health Systems - Joe Granneman
1:30p	Customer Speaker:  DTCC - Rahul Arya
2:00p	Customer Speaker:  Jacobs - Sean Byars
2:30p	Customer Speaker:  Turner Padget, David Michael
3:00p	Customer Speaker:  Dennis Jansson, Lantmannen
3:30p	Wii Giveaway

The Demo God

Josh Tseng talks about the live product demonstration Riverbed will be performing throughout the Interop show.

And here is the demo.  Great job Josh!  Only 50+ more to go.

Branch Office Box with Riverbed

Naveen Prabhu talks about how the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) provides a facility for running up to 5 services like domain controller, DNS/DHCP, video streaming, and even security.

Accelerate, Assess, and Adapt with Riverbed

Alex Alvarez discusses how Riverbed's Cascade product provides detailed visibility into network and application traffic. In fact, Cascade is setup to monitor all Interop traffic and Alex has some interesting tidbits to share about the current findings.

The public cloud will be the way to leverage the IT dollar

Thomas Prokop, Manager of Information and Remote Services at Prokop attended Riverbed's Cloud9 event in New York and answered the "what does the cloud mean to you?" question.

The Cloud is the Future

At Riverbed's Cloud9 party during Interop in New york, Michael Vassallo, Sr. Network Administrator at Dancker, Sellew, Douglas, offered his opinion on what the cloud means.

Eating our own dogfood, part 3

 
 "Cisco has approximately 300 global offices that have less than 45Mbps bandwidth.  Cisco partner IBM will deploy Cisco WAAS in these offices during the remainder of 2008 and part of fiscal year 2009. Configuring the WAN gateway at each office to intercept certain requests and forward them to the Cisco WAE will take only a few minutes..."

-- from Cisco IT Deployment in Progress, Wide Area Application Services document (dated 2008)

Several months ago I posted my first dogfood blog (http://blog.riverbed.com/2009/06/rtp-eating-our-own-dogfood.html).  In response to that blog, Cisco has been evasive and unclear about whether or not they really use WAAS internally, all while promising that an internal WAAS rollout will be taking place in the future (see also Feng Meng's WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration Case Study blog, dated June 2009).

Now that more than four months have passed, I think it's time to revisit the question again.  My contacts within Cisco IT continue to indicate there is still no signficant WAAS deployment in their production network. Why has Cisco still not executed a world-wide deployment of WAAS in their own network?  Why won't they eat their own dogfood?  Cisco certainly has had more than enough time to complete a worldwide rollout (each WAAS device takes only a few minutes to configure, right?).  Furthermore, Cisco has sold the WAAS product for more than five years at this point, and it seems rather disingenuous for them to sell it to their customers while not using it themselves internally.

Perhaps the real problem is that WAAS faces fundamental issues when deployed in large networks.  One well-known issue is that WAAS uses a per-peer data store.  If you are not familiar with this issue, details about the per-peer data store can be found in my previous blog:

http://blog.riverbed.com/2009/01/riverbeds-universal-data-store.html

Because of its per-peer data store architecture, the core data center WAAS device has dedicated data stores that each match the data store of each remote WAAS device.  For example, a Cisco WAVE-574 appliance has 120GB of DRE storage capacity, and is roughly equivalent to a mid-range Steelhead 1050L.  A core WAAS device in the data center must allocate 120GB of its DRE storage capacity to communicate with and fully utilize the DRE resources of each remote WAVE-574 device at each branch office.  But if Cisco were to deploy a WAVE-574 appliances to each of their 300 branch offices, that would mean a total of 36 TB of DRE storage will be needed in Cisco's core data center.  Since the largest WAAS appliance, the WAE-7371, has 1TB of DRE storage capacity each, this would mean that 36 WAE-7371 appliances would have to be deployed in Cisco's core data center!

Having to deploying 36 WAE-7371 is quite problematic, because they're not cheap at a list price of $129,000 each.  In contrast, Riverbed uses a universal data store architecture, and consequently there is no artificial edge-to-core fan-out ratio driven by data store sizing for the Riverbed solution.  In fact, only about three core Steelhead 6050's would provide a fully-redundant clustered solution for Cisco's internal network, assuming they have about about 18,000 remote users (an average 60 employees distributed to each of Cisco's 300 sites).  Having to deploy 36 (thirty-six) WAE-7371 vs. Riverbed's alternative of just three Steelhead 6050 leads to a huge difference in the price of the overall solution.

But even if Cisco's IT organization was given 36 large WAE-7371 applicances at no cost, and ordered by Cisco management to deploy WAAS, they still face some daunting challenges.  For example, it would be unrealistic for them to serially-chain those 36 appliances in an in-path/in-line configuration.  Using WCCP would be problematic too, because the maximum number of devices in a WCCP cluster is only 32.  The ACE load balancer isn't a good solution either, because it can't address the asymmetrically-routed network traffic that likely exists in Cisco's data centers.

So if the above analysis is correct, it seems that the real reason why Cisco hasn't deployed WAAS is simply that it just wont' scale for Cisco's internal network.  Cisco's dogfood is simply too much to swallow, even for Cisco themselves.  It is a pity that Cisco's internal IT can't use Riverbed, because Riverbed has successfully deployed Steelheads throughout a number of network environments that are far larger than Cisco's.  Here's an example of one happy Riverbed customer who has deployed 700 Steelheads:  http://wdsforum.org/rvrb/board/message?board.id=halloffame&thread.id=140

Steelhead Mobile 3.0 - The Riverbed Prancing Horse?

Since the year 2000 Ferarri has won six  Formula 1 Drivers' Championships, seven Constructors' Championship, and four FIA GT2 Championships but those awards pale in comparison to the impact the company's famed prancing horse icon has when it pulls up to an intersection of a crowded city street.  While only an erudite few may know who Michael Schumacher is or other details from the storied brands recent success, virtually everyone who sees the distinctive Italian cars recognize them as the ultimate driving machines.   Whether a Ferrari is built for the track or the street it is understood that what makes these cars so highly coveted is the understanding that the singular vision of every model they produce is unmitigated performance.  The Riverbed product family share these characteristics as both the Steelhead Appliance and Steelhead Mobile are powered by the same Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) which is what makes today's announcement of the release of Steelhead Mobile 3.0 so exciting.  Steelhead Mobile 3.0 gives IT managers the opportunity to simplify their network infrastructure by offering a single solution to the problems that plague performance 

Whether in the office or on the road, improved integration with the Steelhead appliance allows workers to bring even more of the benefits of the Riverbed Optimization System with them wherever they go. Speed is no longer a barrier to mobility with new protocol optimizations, expanded platform and operating system support, and client developments that improve the performance of the entire Riverbed Technology deployment.  With this release we introduce:

    • Acceleration for Windows 7 and 64-bit Systems
    • Web Applications – up to 20X to 60X faster
    • Branch Warming – Enhanced acceleration for your entire Riverbed deployment.

To learn more about these exciting new features and to try it for yourself, check out What's New With Steelhead Mobile to give your organization Ferrari like performance everywhere!