Riverbed Announces Virtual Steelhead

We at Riverbed are very excited to announce our new Virtual Steelhead product today. 

What is a Virtual Steelhead?  It’s a no-hardware version of a traditional Steelhead Appliance.  The functionality of the Virtual Steelhead should be familiar to experienced Riverbed users; it’s exactly the same as a traditional Steelhead appliance, with all of the current technology advantages intact.  The Virtual Steelhead takes RiOS (Riverbed Optimization Software) and runs it as a virtual machine on any hardware that supports VMware ESX or ESXi 4.0.

Virtual Steelhead allows our customers to get all the features and benefits of WAN Optimization in places and situations where they could not get it before.  We’ve had inquiries from military organizations who want to throw Steelhead appliances out of airplanes (they could always do that) and have them work in combat or other high-pressure situations once they hit the ground (that part was always a little trickier).   Now you’ll be able to take that Virtual Steelhead and run it inside a ruggedized server as just another virtual machine.

We’ve had customers who want the advantages of WAN optimization in an environment where they don’t have the physical space to fit a Steelhead appliance, such as in a local TV news van, at a construction site, or in an Emergency Medical Services vehicle.  Virtual Steelhead will give them all the functionality of a physical Steelhead appliance without consuming any valuable hardware space or taking up any additional network or power ports.

Many of our customers have data centers that are almost entirely virtualized, and they are reluctant to deploy Steelhead appliances in those data centers.  The virtual machines in those data centers are already being managed by tools like vSphere, RightScale, PlateSpin, etc.  Virtual Steelhead fits right in; it can be managed by those same tools.  The end result with Virtual Steelhead is that WAN optimization becomes a viable option for virtually deployed data centers, too.

We also hear from MSPs and their customers quite often.  Many MSPs would like to be able offer WAN Optimization as a premium service to their customers.  The problem (before Virtual Steelhead) is that doing so requires deploying individual Steelhead appliances for each customer, and having sufficient network segregation between multiple customers.   With Virtual Steelhead, the MSP need only deploy a VM for any customer who purchases WAN optimization, enabling the MSP to spin up multiple customers faster and more efficiently.

Virtual Steelhead is a very exciting addition to the Riverbed product set that will permit users to have access to WAN optimization who have never had it before.   Plus you can throw it out of an airplane… and it’ll still work when it hits the ground!