The Riverbed Blog

Customer Testimonial: Greg Moore of SRG Partnership Architects

We have posted a new customer testimonial from Greg Moore, the IT Director at SRG Partnership Architects in Portland, Oregon. 

I met Greg at a recent Riverbed User Group function in Portland, and he approached me just to tell me about his enthusiasm for our products and for the remarkable results he and his firm have seen.  When we suggested that perhaps he might want to do a testimonial video, he jumped at the chance. 

We don't take Greg's enthusiasm for Riverbed lightly; he's an industry veteran of nearly 20 years who has seen a lot of technology. 

If YOU have had some good experiences with Riverbed products, including Steelheads, Cascade, or Riverbed Professional Services or Support, and you'd like to share them with the world, let us know. We are always looking for testimonials.

Thanks to Greg for his enthusiastic endorsement.

 

 

3 more Interop NYC 2010 videos

Riverbed's VP of Product Marketing, Apurva Dave, took part in a panel discussion on WAN Optimization and Virtualization in the Branch office at Interop 2010 in New York City last week. 

First, Apurva spoke for about 10 minutes..

 

Then the panel discussion began.  (It's in two parts due to YouTube limits.)  The second part ends with a short commentary by Apurva of how the panel discussion went.

 

 

Riverbed and Giants painting San Francisco orange

I consider myself a pretty conservative guy.  No tattoos.  No body piercings.  So what was I thinking when I decided to semi-permanently die my hair bright orange?  To make a long story short,an internal movement at Riverbed titled "Team Orange" was started several years ago when we were a much smaller company.  The idea was simple.  When we hit the the "50" milestone then willing participants would have to dye their hair Riverbed orange for 30 days. 

The "50" milestone hit twice recently.  First, Riverbed's stock price recently passed the 50 mark.  Secondly, Riverbed's market share (revenue) in the WAN optimization market was reported to be more than 50% higher than the next competitor, Cisco.

Coincidentally, another San Francisco franchise by the name of the San Francisco Giants, recently passed their own milestone.  The Giants are in the World Series, which hasn't been the case since 2002.  I can't help, but to draw some interesting parallels to Riverbed and the Giants.  The first is that the Giant's team color is strikingly similar to the color of Riverbed's logo.  Secondly, Riverbed's fan base is just as enthusuastic as the Giants.  Last, but certainly not least is the fact that both Riverbed and the Giants overcame major competition to reach a big milestone.  The Giants beat a much more talented and highly favored Phillies team to reach the World Series.  Riverbed also overcame underdog status to beat the mighty Cisco to dominate the WAN optimization market.

For the next 30 days, I will be proudly wearing my orange hair in honor of both Riverbed and the Giants!

 

 

Interop NYC Videos!

We've got five new videos from Interop 2010 in New York this past week, with more to come.  First up is Apurva Dave, Riverbed VP of Product Marketing talking about Virtualization in the Branch Office.  

Next we have a couple of customer presentations from the booth at interop.  The first is from Joe Galardi of Jefferies.  

The next is from Jeff Wilhelm of Accudata.  

And finally a two-part video from John Lax of the International Justice Mission.  Part 1:  

Part 2:

 

We'll have a few more videos from Interop next week.

Day Four at Interop NYC 2010

The fourth day of Interop NYC and the second day of the Vendor Expo began a lot like the previous day.  At 10:30, the doors swung open, and a huge throng of attendees came onto the expo floor.  In the Riverbed booth, we had a series of presentations from customers, and in between some introductory Riverbed presentations that included a live product demo.

The picture on the left is of Joe Gillardi, VP from Technology from Jefferies during his presentation.  On the right is one of our standing-room only audiences that filled our booth throughout the Vendor Expo.

One of my booth presentations included a very interesting and positive exchange with one of the attendees.  The live demo consists of the following:

1. We transfer a 3.5mb PowerPoint file, unoptimized from the show floor to our San Francisco office.  (The connection was a T1 with roughly 190ms latency.)  This takes about 45 seconds.
2. We enable Riverbed WAN Optimization.
3. We delete the first transfer and transfer the file a second time.  The 2nd transfer takes about 3 seconds. 
4. Then to demonstrate that we're not just a file caching solution, we rename the file and send it again.  Takes about 3 seconds again. 

One attendees who was standing in the back challenged me to edit the file and send that instead.  THAT, he said, would prove it's not a file caching solution.  I believe he thought he was heckling me.  So I did just that (opened the PPT file, changed a couple of things, and saved it with a new name).  The transfer of that file took about 3 seconds.  He came up to me after the presentation very impressed, and asked to have an account rep contact him.

Our technology is NOT about file caching.  Instead it's about de-duplication at the bit level.  Whether it's an email attachment, a CIFS transfer, or data embedded in some other type of application stream, if the Steelhead Appliance recognizes the bit stream, it de-duplicates it, sending a 16-byte reference to the data which is already stored on the remote Steelhead Appliance, rather than the megabytes or gigabytes of real data that's already been sent.  The remote Steelhead Appliance reconstructs the original data before sending it on to the user, who gets the exact same file (byte for byte) and is unaware that anything has changed.  Except that it got there a whole lot faster.

Anyway, Interop NYC 2010 is over.  We'll post some videos recorded at the show later on today.  Special thanks to our customer presenters, Joe Gillardi from Jefferies, Michael Hart from Mirubeni America, and Jeff Wilhelm from Accudata.

 

Riverbed goes application-aware with CACE acquisition

Riverbed announced today the acquisition of CACE Technologies.  This acquisition brings state-of-the-art network traffic recording, analysis, and inspection to our Cascade solution for network and application visibility.

Talk about synergies.  Not only will CACE bring innovate application-aware capabilities to the Riverbed product family, the fact that the flagship product is named the Shark appliance is already a good sign that it will fit in well with Riverbed's other fishy named Steelhead appliance product.

There is also a nice blog post within the Wireshark community at Wireshark.org.

Day three at Interop NYC 2010

Even though it really started on Monday, for many people, the Interop NYC 2010 conference began this morning at 10:30, when the big doors swung open for the Vendor Expo.  More than 125 vendors filled the massive exhibition hall, but if you came in through the main entrance, you could not miss the big, well-lit, and brightly colored Riverbed booth, which was brimming with activity all day.

There's a stage with a large video screen and about 25 seats, where a nearly continuous stream of presentations filled the seats with interested viewers.  Attendees got t-shirts for their time, but more importantly got some really good information about WAN Optimization.  We also had presentations from three Riverbed customers, each of whom told real stories about their Riverbed implementations, and the great benefits that they have received:

1. Michael Hart from Marubeni America
2. Jeff Wilhelm from Accudata
3. Joe Galardi from Jeffries

The rest of the booth contains a series of live demos from Riverbed people, and a couple of continuous video streams.  Overhead is the largest indoor sign I've ever seen.

On Thursday, the 3 customers will each speak again in our booth, and we'll have the same all-day stream of presentations.  There will also be a presentation from Apurva Dave,Vice President of Product Marketing during the afternoon at one of the breakout sessions (3:25pm in room 1E08).

We'll have more pictures tomorrow.

Day Two at Interop 2010

Today was the second day of the Interop NYC CIO Boot Camp.  As event sponsors, Riverbed was invited to have one of our customers speak before the group of about 40 CIOs.  The speaker was John Lax, Vice President of Information Systems for the International Justice Mission.

Mr. Lax spoke for about 30 minutes, and it was 30 minutes when nobody was checking their Blackberries or iPhones.  Everybody is familiar with mission-critical IT and the demands of users, but in Mr. Lax's world, these terms take on new meaning.  His organization doesn't measure ROI in terms of dollars, but rather in terms of lives saved and people helped.  As we've discussed in this space, IJM is a human rights agency that secures justice for victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression.  Mr. Lax and his team do a truly amazing job in remarkable circumstances with a very small IT budget.

We expect to have a complete video of his presentation available on Friday.  Please make some time to see what he has to say.  It will change your perspective on IT.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) begins the Interop Vendor Expo.  Riverbed has booth #221, which is right inside the main entrance.  You won't miss our huge overhead sign; here it is this afternoon before it was hung up.

Day One at Interop 2010 NYC

Today I had the good fortune to sit in for about half the day in the CIO Boot Camp at Interop New York.  The CIO Boot Camp was sponsored by Riverbed (which is how I got to sit in).  The conversations and discussions were fascinating: what will be The Next Big Thing in IT, some fascinating approaches to Vendor Management, the present and future of outsourcing.  The moderator, Thornton May, was extremely lively and entertaining.

The Boot Camp continues tomorrow with a presentation from John Lax of the International Justice Mission.  We'll have pictures and discussions about it tomorrow night, and if all goes well, a complete video of his talk on our YouTube channel by the end of the week.

Riverbed is the only vendor sponsor of the CIO Boot Camp this year.  In past years, we've been one of a few vendors to sponsor it, but not this year. 

Riverbed is also very visible in the attendee enrollment area of the Javits Center.  Registration is performed on PCs that are spread out over a bunch of tables.  On each PC screen is a Riverbed ad, and next to each of the PCs is some Riverbed literature.  (See the picture on the left side.)

Also, right behind a statue of the Convention Center's namesake, Senator Jacob Javits, you can see a large poster-sized Riverbed ad ("Break the Performance Barrier"). (See the picture on the right.)  It's going to be very difficult to miss Riverbed if you attend Interop 2010 New York.

The expo floor opens Wednesday; look for us in Booth 221, in the big booth right inside the main entrance.

The Role of WAN Optimization in Cloud Infrastructures

As Evan Marcus noted, I did give a presentation at Storage Networking World (SNW) in Dallas last week on the "Role of WAN Optimization in Cloud Infrastructures."  I was quite impressed with the attendance, which was well beyond my expectations despite it being on the last day of the conference.  That's a indication there is strong interest in the topic.

Anyways, for those of you who weren't able to attend, I've summarized some of the main points of the presentation:

1)  The basic value proposition of the Cloud is for providers to obtain quantities of scale.  Cloud providers pass the benefits of lower per-unit IT costs to the enterprise customers through lower pricing for IT services (at a lower cost than the enterprise can procure those services themselves), while pocketing the remaining value as profit.  Cloud providers also provide deeper technical expertise through their specialization and focus on delivering IT services.

2) WAN optimization solutions deployed into the Cloud must similarly be able to scale.  A given WAN optimization product that might work for a small or medium-sized enterprise network will not necessarily be able to scale for a Cloud service provider's infrastructure, which must support multiple enterprise customers--some of them very large.  In such a massive-scale Cloud data center, the Cloud-hosted WAN optimization solution must be able to scale to extremely high connection counts, throughputs, and remote peer sites.  This is clearly a challenge for many WAN optimization product offerings in the market today.

3)  WAN optimization provides benefits for both Cloud Compute and Cloud Storage.  For Cloud computing, WAN optimization maintains fast access to cloud-hosted application data despite bandwidth and latency issues in the WAN.  For Cloud Storage, WAN optimization facilitates the backup and archival of enterprise data into the Cloud by speeding up the transfer of that data into the Cloud.

4)  Since WAN optimization is a dual-ended solution, the devices deployed in your network will have to interact with the WAN optimization devices deployed in the Cloud provider's infrastructure.    This becomes the natural conclusion when you consider that interoperability between WAN optimization products from different vendors is about as likely as Microsoft open-sourcing the software code behind Windows.  With this in mind, it becomes important to ensure that WAN optimization product you choose to deploy for your enterprise will also be supported by your Cloud provider.

Interop New York Begins Monday

Interop New York begins on Monday.  Riverbed will be well-represented at this  week-long extravanganza at the Jacob Javits Convention Center on the West Side of Manhattan.  We'll have a customer presentation at the CIO Boot Camp on Tuesday morning, we'll have a booth on the Expo Floor (Booth 221; stop by and tell us you saw it on the Blog!), and your humble blogger leaves that hat behind and becomes a journalist. 

Look for video, photos, tweets (@riverbed), blog posts, Facebook posts, and maybe even some telegrams or Morse Code from the show floor.  If all goes well, we'll have videos of the expo floor, interviews with unsuspecting attendees who stop by at our booth (remember, that's Booth 221), and even some video of our customer speaker, John Lax, VP of Information Systems for the International Justice Mission, a human rights agency that secures justice for victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression.  He has quite a remarkable presentation planned.  If you're there, please make sure you see it.

It's gonna be a busy and full week.  Please stop by and say hi if you're there.  We'll be in Booth 221.

SNW Dallas Wraps Up with Josh Tseng

Today is the final day of SNW Dallas, and your chance to hear our own Josh Tseng, regular blogger in this space and all-around good guy, talk about the new world of Cloud Computing and its relationship to existing WANs.  Here is the description of his talk:

Cloud computing promises to deliver potential gains in efficiency and cost savings by consolidating IT assets into public and private data centers. Virtualization technologies allow migration of virtual machines and data into and out of Cloud infrastructures. However, cloud-hosted information assets must still be accessed by users over existing WAN infrastructures, where there are performance issues due to bandwidth and latency constraints. Learn how WAN optimization is one of the key--and often overlooked--technology component necessary for the adoption of cloud computing.

If you're going to pursue cloud computing, and we believe a lot of organizations will be heading in that direction, then you're going to need to look at WAN Optimization.  Cloud computing makes the WAN more important to the success of the organization than ever before.  Make sure your WAN is the best and most efficient that it can be.

Riverbed and President Clinton Appearing at McAfee Focus 10

Starting tomorrow in Las Vegas, our partner McAfee is throwing their third annual Security Conference, Focus 10.  It'll be three full days of concentrated learning and networking. Attendees will hear from industry experts and learn how others are using the latest technologies to thwart multi-pronged attacks, achieve compliance, and reduce risk. They'll learn how to implement integrated, strategic solutions to make their security initiatives both more operationally and cost effective.

Riverbed is one of the Bronze Sponsors of the event, and we'll be exhibiting on the Expo Floor. McAfee is a close partner of Riverbed's, and McAfee Firewall Enterprise and McAfee Web Gateway are both available as virtual machines within the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) environment.

To me, though, the coolest part of this particular conference is that President Bill Clinton will be delivering the keynote address on Tuesday afternoon.  There is no question that IT security is a vitally important issue, especially as society becomes increasingly dependent on IT, but when you have a former US President speaking on the subject, that raises the topic to another level.

Five guidelines for evaluating WAN optimization products

Care and due diligence is a part of evaluating any IT product, and it's especially important in this difficult economic environment where every investment dollar must count.  But in the WAN optimization market, effective due diligence can be a perplexing challenge, because it seems all the different vendors are saying the same things about their products!

The following are some suggestions on how to differentiate the various vendor offerings.  These suggestions are based on the experiences I've had interacting with numerous customers who have successfully navigated the evaluation process, and are now extremely happy with the results they've received from their selected WAN optimization products:

1)  The cheapest product is not necessarily the best deal -- Remember the adage that you get what you pay for.  What customers should be looking for instead is the return on investment (ROI) for a given offering.  The fact is that the cheapest, lowest-priced product does not necessarily provide the best ROI.  When a given vendor is too eager to offer a lower price than competitive vendors (and in some cases, for free!), more likely than not there's a hidden reason for that cheap price. 

2)  For large-scale deployments, avoid placing too much weight on limited-scale lab tests or proof-of-concept (POC) tests -- it's natural for any customer to want to "test-drive" the product before purchasing it.  And certainly a lab test and/or POC should be a part of the evaluation process when purchasing WAN optimization.  However, it's vitally important that these tests be conducted with the knowledge that there are a number of issues that will not be exposed or observed in a limited-scale test.  One example of such an issue is the per-peer data store architecture used in Cisco WAAS and most other WAN optimization products.  The bottom line is that a limited-scale lab test or POC will provide limited insight about the product's ability to scale.  And scalability is a very important consideration if you have a large network with a considerable number of users.

3)  Avoid the temptation to compare a vendor's product roadmap to Riverbed's existing product capabities -- It's no secret that the Riverbed Steelhead offering is more sophisticated and feature-packed when compared to offerings from any other vendor in the WAN optimization market.  And when confronted about the features and capabilities that are missing from their products, competitive vendors invariably will claim that the missing features are on their product roadmap and will be available "soon."  But upon closer examination you will find that most competitive vendors have failed to execute on their product roadmap plans over the past few years, and that raises questions about whether they will be able to execute on them in the future.  The bottom line is that competitive products should be compared by evaluating their existing and proven features and capabilities, and not by listening to vendor promises of future product plans that may or may not come true.

4)  Don't just assume that WAN optimization is a commodity market -- It would be nice if selecting a WAN optimization vendor were as easy as deciding on which station to fill up your automobile's gas tank.  But WAN optimization is a highly-differentiated market, and the various vendor offerings are not the same.   Purchasing from the first vendor to walk in the door or from your default network equipment vendor can turn out to be a mistake that will lead to months or years of headaches. 

5)  Always speak to the vendor's existing WAN optimization customers -- The various WAN optimization vendors all tend to say the same things about their products, but that's not necessarily the case about each vendor's respective customers.  The most important guideline for evaluating WAN optimization products is to talk confidentially to existing customers of each vendor you are evaluating. You will be startled by what you find.  Don't accept name-dropping or vague hints at "successful" deployments with 1000 remote sites--make sure you actually reach out and have that one-on-one conversation with an existing customer.  And in order to be a reliable reference, that customer must have deployed the vendor's WAN optimization products in a similar network environment to your own, with applications and network size (a similar number of users and locations) that approximate your own network.  At Riverbed, we're comfortable when prospective customers speak with our existing customers; a recent survey we did on Riverbed customers indicated an overall satisfaction rating of 8.41 out of 10 (with 10 being the most satisfied).

Riverbed dinners with CIO Magazine

I just returned from a very nice dinner in Orlando, Florida, with Charles Pelton of CIO Magazine, Doug Kruger of Riverbed, and several central-Florida IT Managers. These dinners are low-key affairs where the attendees are invited to discuss their business and IT drivers and challenges, and to compare notes about what's going on in their IT organizations. Everything is off-the-rec and very casual.

Interestingly, every single attendee at tonight's dinner said that their #1 IT concern for the coming year is Security.  One person even called 2011 The Year of Security.  Another said that his organization sees hundreds or thousands of attempted online break-ins every day.

Other topics that we heard a lot included data center consolidation and standardization, virtualization, and doing more and more with less and less.  And while these are areas where Riverbed can bring tremendous value, the idea behind these dinners is to exchange information; we don't want them to be Riverbed sales presentations. 

We will be holding these dinners at various times and places around the country (tomorrow night in Tampa), and if you have the chance to attend, I urge you to join us.  The conversation is engaging, the company is fascinating, and the food is excellent!

 

Cascade Demo - Chapter 1: Jack's New Job

Jack is the manager of the network team and is confronted with application performance problem reports from his users. To find out how Jack delivers good, consistent application performance, watch the rest of the demo here

 

Riverbed's First 2010 Performance Hall of Fame Winner

We're very pleased to announce that we've awarded the first monthly prize (a Riverbed-branded Flip video camera) in the 2010 edition of our Performance Hall of Fame. 

Our first winner is KenOSmith3, whose posting entitled "Riverbed Steelheads are BFM (Black F'n Magic)"  colorfully reported reductions of 70% in WAN traffic and a 3.3x increase in bandwidth.

Users post graphs and descriptions of the benefits that their Steelhead Appliance implementation has brought them in the Performance Hall of Fame forum in Riverbed's community forums.  Readers then get the opportunity to give kudos to (vote for) their favorite postings.  At the end of each month, we award a Flip camera to the posting that has received the most votes. Votes will carry over to future months (though KenOSmith3 isn't eligible to win again!).

Thanks to everyone who voted and everyone who has entered.  If you haven't entered, please be sure you enter as soon as you can.  You could win next month!   Everyone who enters receives a special Riverbed PHOF t-shirt. 

And make sure you vote!  Everybody is eligible to vote.