The Riverbed Blog

Welcoming the new Evangelist

Hello Fans of the Riverbed Blog,

I’m Evan Marcus, and I have just recently joined the Riverbed Marketing Evangelism team.  (Yes, we all know that makes me Evan the Evangelist.  Just laugh now and get it out of your system.)  I’ll be based out of my home office in northern New Jersey.  (Just laugh now and get that out of your system, too.)

What that means is that I’ll be working with Bob Gilbert, Riverbed’s Director of Marketing for Customers, Community, and Evangelism to sing the Gospel of Riverbed.  What that really means is that I’ll be blogging (this is the first of many), vlogging, and speaking at a variety of Riverbed events about what we do, and why everybody needs it so much.  I’ll also be taking a lead role in Riverbed’s Social Media presence (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube), and the Riverbed Community web site, and I will be a very visible face at Riverbed User Group meetings, especially those in the Eastern US. 

I come from a fairly varied technical and communications-oriented background.  Most recently I’ve been a Sales Engineer with some extra writing or speaking duties at a variety of small technology companies including nlyte Software and Archivas Software.  Before all that, I spent 8 years at Veritas Software, where, among other things, I co-wrote and edited four books, including Blueprints for High Availability and The Resilient Enterprise (a book about Disaster Recovery).  With the title “Availability Maven,” I became a speaker at a variety of Veritas conferences and events, and even organized and MC’d their internal engineering conference two straight years. I’ve also been a semi-regular tutorial instructor at the LISA and USENIX conferences for the last 10 years or so.

I have had a lot of exposure to a variety of different technologies, including Unix systems, Windows systems, storage, data center design and capacity planning, networking, discovery, security, and more.  I’ve also developed some interactive web sites in my spare time.

Riverbed is a very exciting place to be, and I am thrilled to be here.  I am consistently impressed by the technology here.  The words I keep hearing are Speed, Scalability, and Simplicity.  It’s obvious to me that that’s more than just words to the people here at Riverbed; that shows in everything I’ve seen since I arrived.

I look forward to meeting you at Riverbed events.  If you see me at a Riverbed event, please don’t hesitate to introduce yourself to me. 

Thank you,

Evan Marcus
evan.marcus@riverbed.com    

Five Common Myths of WAN Optimization

"It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction.  Fiction, after all, has to make sense"

- Mark Twain

A key challenge in properly evaluating and selecting a WAN optimization product is distinguishing myth from reality.  Here are some common misconceptions about WAN optimization that can often lead to trouble:

Myth #1:  WAN optimization is a commodity - This view is promoted by vendors with weak offerings in WAN optimization.  Their goal is to convince customers that WAN optimization products are just like routers, switches, and other commodity products, and that it doesn't matter which vendor or product you choose.  The reality is that WAN optimization is a relatively new and fast-growing technology area.  There is a world of differentiation in the WAN optimizaiton offerings from the various vendors.  Not all vendor products can optimize the various types of protocols and applications that are found in your network.  Not all products are easy to use.  Not all products can scale to the requirements of your network environment. 

Myth #2:  The cheapest WAN optimization product provides the best value - The commoditization myth is often accompanied by the thinking that the cheapest product provides the best value.  The reality is that you get what you pay for.  If you want a luxury-class Mercedes automobile, then you have to pay for it--it would be unrealistic to expect to get a Mercedes for the price of a bare-bones economy car.  In a similar way it would be unrealistic to expect that the cheapest offering will deliver the best performance and scalability.  Vendors who discount their WAN optimization offerings do so in order to compensate for significant product deficiencies.  Riverbed may not be the lowest-priced offering, but the Steelhead solution clearly provides the best value and shortest return-on-investment. 

Myth #3: There's no need to talk to customer references as long as you're buying from Cisco - There's a certain level of trust that comes from buying from the largest network equipment vendor in the world. And in many cases, that trust is warranted, especially if you're buying Cisco's core commodity products such as routers and switches that many other customers use.  But there is a good reason why Cisco is not a leader in the WAN optimization market--there are numerous accounts of WAAS failing in production deployments, resulting in frustration and pain for WAAS users.  This alone is a good reason to make sure you talk to other customers who have attempted to use WAAS, before you try to do it yourself.

Myth#4:  A simple lab test will determine if a particular WAN optimization offering works for your environment -- The reality is that just about all product offerings work well in a simple lab test (if they don't, well then they shouldn't even be in business).  The problem is that isolated lab environments only test a small subset of factors that are found in real-life production networks.  For example, isolated lab tests often don't expose data corruption issues that can result from connectivity outages and other unpredictable WAN behavior.  Isolated lab tests don't expose aggressive non-TCP behavior by some products that steal bandwidth from other applications sharing the WAN.  And isolated lab tests can't be conducted at a scale that exposes performance problems resulting from a per-peer data store architecture, as described in one of my previous blogs.  These, and an unlimited number of other issues can and will escape detection in a simple lab test.  Rather, the best way to determine if a particular WAN optimization offering will work in your environment is to talk to a reference customer who is using that product in a similar-sized network environment to your own.

Myth #5:  Cisco's next WAAS software release will finally catch up to Riverbed -- Cisco has been competing with Riverbed since 2004.  And in each of these past years, Cisco has made bold claims that the next WAAS software release will fix all of the problems that afflicted earlier versions of WAAS and will finally catch up to Riverbed.  But despite Cisco's repeated pronouncements, today's WAAS users lack numerous capabilities that Riverbed customers enjoy, while continuing to suffer through stability issues that plague the latest WAAS software versions.  Rather than catch up to Riverbed, Cisco's WAAS product seems to be falling further behind.  But despite these observations, it's possible that we haven't seen the last of this myth.  At some point--perhaps later this year--Cisco will introduce yet another new WAAS software release.  This release, just like the countless other WAAS software releases before it, will also be proclaimed by Cisco to be nearly equivalent to Riverbed.  My suggestion:  don't hold your breath...

Accelerate 10 Exhibition Hall

A glimpse of the exhibition hall at Riverbed's Accelerate 10 conference

McAfee Firewall on Riverbed's Steelhead appliance

David Colodny, Director of Strategic Alliances for McAfee talks about how his company's firewall solution is deployed on Riverbed's Steelhead appliance.

The Riverbed Services Platform enables consolidation inside the branch

Rick Holden, Director of Technology Alliances at Riverbed spends a few minutes at Accelerate 10 talking about Riverbed's RSP capability.  He closes the conversation with a good joke.

Providing video delivery services with Polycom on Riverbed

Polycom product manager Derrick Fitzgerald takes a moment at Accelerate 10 to discuss how Polycom running on Riverbed's Steelhead appliance

Riverbed takes a Doubletake

Cascade provides network and application visibility

Infoblox IP address management on Riverbed's Steelhead appliance

Riverbed used in war effort

What are Riverbed's top tech support issues?

Riverbed provides professional services certification

Verizon professional services for Riverbed-powered managed services

How the Apple iPhone and the Riverbed Steelhead are similar

Question:  What is a key competitive advantage shared by both the Apple iPhone and Riverbed Steelhead?

Answer:  They both support more applications than competitive products

Riverbed offers more application-specific optimization capabilities than any other WAN optimization product.  Application-specific optimization capabilities are important for two reasons:  1)  some applications exhibit chatty protocol behavior that results in poor performance in a high-latency environment, and 2)  some applications perform encoding, encryption, and/or compression of their data, and this process obscures any data redundancy that may exist in the application data.  Note that these are layer-7 attributes of these applications, which cannot be addressed by applying compression or any other mechanism at lower layers in the OSI protocol stack including layer-3 and layer-4.

For those applications in the former category that exhibit chatty protocol behavior, the WAN optimization solution must be able to intelligently and predictively pre-fetch data in order to remove round-trip interactions across the WAN.  For those applications that encode their data somehow, the WAN optimization solution must be able to undo any such encoding, compression, or encryption prior to applying its compression and data reduction algorithms.  Otherwise, those algorithms will be ineffective or less effective when performed on the encoded data format.  Note that some applications exhibit both types of these behaviors.

The Riverbed Steelhead solution is able to address both types of issues for a wide range of applications and protocols, including CIFS, NFS, MAPI2003, MAPI2007, encrypted MAPI, Lotus Notes, HTTP, SSL, Oracle Forms (both Sun JRE and Oracle JInitiator), MS-SQL, and Citrix ICA.  And we're always working on adding more applications--in the future you'll see still more application-specific optimization capabilities added to this list.

So why has Riverbed been able to sustain and extend its lead in application-specific capabilities over competitive vendors?  One reason is because Riverbed is able to focus more engineering resources on WAN optimization compared to any other vendor.  While Cisco is certainly a larger company, Riverbed has greater WAN optimization market share than Cisco.  Furthermore, WAAS revenues from WAN optimization represent only about 0.5% of Cisco's overall business revenues; Riverbed has more resources in terms of development and support engineers who are focused just on WAN optimization.

On the other hand at least one of the smaller WAN optimization vendors claim that "network-level" or "network-centric" WAN optimization is faster or somehow better than "application-centric" optimization--an apparent reference to Riverbed's vastly superior application-aware optimization capabilities.  That is essentially saying that their product can deliver faster performance for applications by being ignorant of the protocol-specific behavior of those applications.  This fallacious statement is meant to distract from the observation that the vendor lacks the engineering development resources needed to keep up with Riverbed's more application-aware Steelhead offering.  Another problem with this line of reasoning is that compression products dating back to the early 1990's have always been able to perform "network-level" layer-3 optimization.  In fact, application-specific optimization capabilities is one of the key distinctions between the older-era compression devices (e.g., PacketShaper) and the new-generation of WAN optimization solutions available from Riverbed.

New InfoWorld Review of Riverbed WAN Optimization

Today InfoWorld released their latest review of Riverbed Steelhead WAN Optimization, after extensive benchmarking and evaluation of the features, performance, and manageability.  I'll let you read the conclusions for yourself:

"Each time I get my hands on a new Steelhead appliance, I come away impressed by how Riverbed can still find ways to improve it. The new features in RiOS 6 add even more capacity, flexibility, and scalability to an already superb product, and the new chassis fits in well with midsize office needs, yet doesn't scrimp on any particular feature. All in all, Riverbed continues to define what a WAN optimization and acceleration appliance should be. No IT shop evaluating a WAN acceleration and optimization solution should pass up a chance to put a Steelhead appliance through its paces." - Keith Schultz, InfoWorld

Read the full review here.

And here's some history on Riverbed's performance in the InfoWorld Technology of the Year awards for Best WAN Accelerator, where we've won first place five years in a row from 2005 to 2009....

Top 10 Reasons to Deploy WAN Optimization for Disaster Recovery

 

Short of a world-ending Eschaton epidemic of earthquakes, volcanoes, and floods like that coming in 2012, most data protection is simple: take everything and copy it somewhere far enough away so that you’ll have it when you need it — in an emergency. The challenge is how to do this in the most efficient and reliable way.

 

Un-optimized wide area network-based approaches to data backup are naturally limited by the performance of the WAN (wide area network). Bandwidth limitations and network latency can make backup take much longer than desired. For large remote offices with significant datastores, this can make WAN-based backup impossible without significant costly WAN bandwidth upgrades. Deploying WAN optimization solutions can help you protect more, recover faster, reduce risk and save money.

 

Below we provide 10 reasons to deploy WAN optimization for disaster recovery

 

10. Eliminate Backup in Branches. By effectively leveraging the wide area network for backup or replication of data in branch offices, you can save on the hardware, software, and administrative costs of local backup, tape duplication, and manual offsite transportation of tapes.

 

9. Reduce Costs. Data streamlining deduplicates WAN traffic, reducing disaster recovery bandwidth requirements by up to 95%, cutting your network costs significantly. Also the elimination of branch backup brings massive savings for every office.

 

8. Reduce Administrative Overhead. Using the WAN as your data transport mechanism instead of tapes provides automated, reliable DR operations. No more time wasted in the shuffling of tapes by IT staff (or non-IT staff for that matter!).

 

7. Reduce Security Risk. Eliminating tape transport and encrypting WAN traffic, coupled with centralized storage and role-based administration, makes passing industry and government regulatory audits much, much easier. No headline news about loss of your confidential information.

 

6. Protect More Data. By accelerating replication and backup up to 45x faster across the WAN, you can now cover not just mission-critical data, but ALL the data across your enterprise, while easily making your backup windows. This includes mobile workers laptops too.

 

5. Protect More Often. Faster DR on the WAN also translates into great improvements in your recovery point objective (RPO), reducing the amount of time and data that could have been lost since your last backup.

 

4. Recover Faster. Restore data across the WAN instantly instead of waiting for backup tapes to be found and delivered for an improved recovery time objective (RTO). Or better yet, have all your data staged and ready to go in your remote DR site. Even improve business continuity by having employees working productively from remote or temporary locations after a site disaster.

 

3. Centralize Storage or Move it to the Cloud. Whether you choose public or private cloud storage, enjoy the resilience and economies of scale for reduced costs and fast access from anywhere.

 

2. Make the Most of Your Storage Investment. Get more from your current storage hardware and software, and have the confidence of knowing that the solutions have been qualified and certified for use with Riverbed.

 

1. Have Your DR operations Play Nice with Your Business Apps. Use powerful quality of service (QoS) capabilities to match your priorities, whether you want replication to take precedence over other WAN traffic or vice versa, never slow things down.

 

To find out more about the benefits of how Riverbed WAN optimization solutions benefits DR, please visit http://www.riverbed.com/results/solutions/centralize_replicate/.