A Riverbed customer was recently spotlighted in SearchCIO. This is a nice example that demonstrates how important the role of behavioral analytics is to a network monitoring solution.
The following customer quote describes one of the ways that Westbury uses the advanced analytics capability of Riverbed Cascade to proactively solve network performance problems.
"You can actually feed data back into Riverbed's Cascade and let it run on autopilot, so that it can build up its own behavioral analysis. Someone uses their own environment Monday through Friday, 9-5, and then suddenly their machine turns on and is being used on a Sunday afternoon. Now it's possible that they're just catching up on work, but it's also possible that it's been hijacked. The system will flag that, and the human can follow up with that."
For more information about Riverbed's Cascade product, please visit http://www.riverbed.com/us/products/cascade/index.php
by Michael Kreiger, VP Market Experts with Ziff Davis Enterprise.
What’s in a name? A lot, when it comes to Cloud Computing, one of the buzzword darlings of the 21st century. To IT old-timers it’s a return to mainframes and dumb terminals of decades ago. To others, it represents a new way of defining the relationship between man and machine. To me, it’s a bit of both.
Last week I had the opportunity to share the just-released May 2011 Baseline Magazine research study on Cloud Computing with a number of my friends at Riverbed’s world headquarters here in San Francisco, thanks to special dispensation from Ziff Davis Enterprise research director Guy Currier. Here are some highlights from the study and the lively discussion that followed.
First, we found that the major attraction of the cloud wasn’t so much cost savings as it was about versatility – being able to scale at a moment’s notice both up and out. And cloud customers are looking for the right toolset – including management tools – to allocate, secure and integrate cloud offerings into their existing operations seamlessly.
We talked at length about the technical definition of Cloud Computing – but what it boiled down to during our discussion was this: “Rapid scalability for a fair price”. Whether you’re using Cloud backup or a hosted CRM application, having that versatility at your (or your users’) fingertips seems to be the resonating point in this whole cloud market.
A major cloud driver we discussed was the cascading growth in the amount of storage that organizations generate daily. If you believe in the adage that “storage that exists in only one place is storage you don’t care about” then you’ll understand why backup and archiving are entry points to cloud computing for many an enterprise. Moving these tedious tasks from on-site tapes to remote cloud-located disks not only frees up local resources and real estate, it more importantly can turn the drudgery of backup/archiving into enablement of a disaster recovery or business continuity plan that just wasn’t feasible before.
The study looked at what users perceive as top challenges in could deployment for the next two years. It’s no surprise that the number one concern with public clouds was security. What did surprise me was that for private clouds the top TWO concerns were security related – Unauthorized access and loss prevention came in respectively as one and two on the private cloud “risk” list.
We wrapped our meeting discussing what cloud users look for when they source a solution. Since every solution from archiving to application hosting touches the entire enterprise – no matter how or where it’s sourced – real ROI will come from providers who deliver on the big three: Security, reliability and versatility.
Michael Krieger began his IT career as a mainframe programmer/analyst in the early 1970s. He has led the development and marketing of data communications, superserver, blade and SaaS products for a variety of tech companies and is currently VP Market Experts with Ziff Davis Enterprise. Michael can be reached at michael.krieger@ziffdavisenterprise.com
Over the next few weeks, we'll be giving some of our blog space to a very select group of young adults. Every summer Riverbed opens its doors to a group of interns who get the opportunity to see how a corporation like Riverbed works from the inside, while learning how to make their own contributions to our success. Every week we'll ask them some questions and record a brief video and post the results here in the blog.
We'll start today with Jennifer Douglass, who is interning in our Public Relations (PR) Department, and Emily Pyne, who is interning in Social Media Marketing.
Jennifer Lynn Douglass
Department at Riverbed: Public Relations under PR Manager, Jin Woo
Have you interned at Riverbed before? What did you enjoy/learn?
Last summer I worked with Bryan Flanagan as an Internal Sales Intern. I highly enjoyed working with Bryan and his sales force team. I learned so much about Riverbed as a company, its products, employees, corporate environment, the ins and outs of corporate sales; and finally, many practical skills that have helped me as a student, a returning intern, and a future employee in the corporate world. Furthermore, I was able to interview Alex Grossman, Director of Marketing Services; and Joe Franklin, Copywriter; to gain a better insight into marketing, which is what I am studying at CSU Chico.
What projects are you working on?
In this first week I have met with and shadowed the PR team under Jin Woo. Thus far I have sat in on many meetings where I have learned an incredible amount about the inner workings of PR. I have been assigned the following tasks for the next few days:
Update a co-workers contact sheet
Update the Master Media Contact List
Upload Press Releases into our internal Portal
Add various contacts on our Twitter page
Watch a video and list times when various individuals are featured
More to come!
What are you hoping to learn at your time at riverbed this summer?
I am hoping to learn as much as I can about PR, what tools I can use in the future, and further fine tune the path to achieve my goals. So far everyone is helping me with my goals and I hope to be as helpful as I can be as well.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
As far as career goals go, I see myself having a job that will propel me into the right direction to achieve my career goals. I am interested in advertising and passionate about creativity in all its forms; which is why I hope to one day be a Creative Director at an advertising agency or a corporation like Riverbed Technology.
Emily Pyne
Department: Social Media Marketing under Bob Gilbert, Director of Marketing
Interests/hobbies: The outdoors, Giants baseball, food, arts and crafts, traveling
Have you interned at Riverbed before?
This is my first summer interning at Riverbed. I am very excited to be part of the team! This is the first time I have worked at a large corporation and I know Riverbed will give me great opportunities and experiences to help me build my future career. I thank Riverbed for reaching out to me and my fellow interns and giving us a chance to gain exposure and practice in the corporate world.
What projects are you working on?
I am currently researching strategies to increase our social media following as well as analyzing our current following. I am also creating a weekly posting for the Riverbed Blog featuring the Riverbed interns. (Thanks for reading!)
What are you hoping to learn at your time at Riverbed this summer?
I am hoping to expand my knowledge of social media/digital marketing, as well as traditional marketing and Public relations. I hope to learn more about Riverbed’s company culture, products, and opportunities.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
In five years I hope to be established at a large company in the San Francisco Bay Area or the Pacific Northwest with a job in Marketing or Public relations. I know working in the Marketing department here at Riverbed will give me very valuable experience to get me where I want to go!
As a sales engineer, clients commonly ask me ‘what else could we do to improve application performance over the WAN?’ I normally respond with something like, “Keeping the network available and using WAN acceleration to make applications faster provides good performance. However, integrated application-layer Quality of Service (QoS) and robust performance visibility provides GREAT performance.” QoS enables predictable performance over the WAN. Robust performance visibility provides the ability to efficiently solve problems. If you want a worry-free WAN, in which business applications run well even under the heaviest utilization loads, then today’s blog post is for you.
Earlier this year, RiOS 6.5 was released with a major QoS overhaul. This included application-layer classification via AppFlow; basic/advanced modes with robust traffic shaping improvements; and workflow improvements to save tons of time. If you want to ensure your precious WAN resources are mapped to strategic priorities, then RiOS 6.5 is your new best friend. With it customers can easily control tricky recreational applications, enterprise port hopping applications like Microsoft Exchange/Outlook’s RPC, and UDP-based Voice/Video. This is a huge benefit for triple-play networks where balancing the simultaneous demand of voice, video, and data can be daunting. While QoS isn’t sexy, it enables customers to ensure performance when the WAN is most heavily utilized…instead of getting a call complaining about application problems just as they’re sitting down for dinner with the family.
While customers could use router-based QoS, they’ll find deploying WAN Acceleration and QoS in two different devices is less than ideal. Application-layer classification is critical in today’s networks where many applications tunnel over HTTP or port hop (Outlook/Exchange, VoIP, etc). Applying application layer QoS is the biggest challenge for enterprises since the WAN Accelerator obscures OSI Layers 5 - 7 (the application signatures) from the router. If you want application layer classification then moving QoS to the Steelhead is the best option. The Steelhead can see all the application signatures prior to optimization and apply the most appropriate QoS level. If the WAN supports Classes of Service then the Steelhead can also intelligently mark DiffServ bits, so an application’s packets are treated accordingly across the whole network. This enables an application-aware end-to-end QoS architecture. To learn how to configure the new QoS features in RiOS 6.5 refer to Chapter 3 of the RiOS 6.5 Riverbed Deployment Guide and Chapter 7 of the Steelhead Management Console User Guide.
With the acquisitions of Mazu and CACE Technologies Riverbed gained several unique visibility solutions…Cascade Profiler, Pilot, and Shark. The rapid integration of these solutions with Steelheads has delivered a formidable and cost-effective performance analysis toolset that tightly integrates with WAN optimization as a whole. Steelheads have long supported NetFlow export and tcpdump for packet captures. With Steelhead’s adoption of cascade-flow export, organizations can migrate from a basic utilization-focused view with Netflow to cascade-flow’s performance-centric view. This enables streamlined monitoring/troubleshooting for applications, sites, networks and users. The customers I’ve had deploy Cascade absolutely love the service dashboards, Active Directory user tracking integration, and true application-layer visibility. When they first migrate from the port and IP address visibility of NetFlow to the application visibility of Cascade they are amazed at what applications are really on their networks.
If they layer on Pilot and Shark they get high-speed packet capture, transaction visualizations, and packet analysis to quickly find the root cause of problems. Riverbed has a long tradition helping customers set new IT speed records, and we’ve just done it again with the addition of Cascade Profiler’s right-click integration with Pilot/Shark. Customers now can drill-down from reports in Cascade Profiler to the transaction and packet visualizations in Pilot all in the same workflow. If they need to go even deeper they just right-click and open only the packets they desire in Wireshark where they can see the exact bit and bytes. My customers have been particularly impressed with Pilot's ability to efficiently find and analyze VoIP call problems. Finding and analyzing performance problems has never been easier. To see videos of Pilot in action go here.
At the end of day, if an organization can’t proactively solve network, application and user performance challenges then they won’t have great performance. When WAN optimization is deployed across an enterprise proper planning and execution to ensure the IT staff has the right visibility into the right data is worth the effort. With Steelheads at remote sites integrated with Cascade at the datacenter customers now have enterprise-wide visibility to efficiently find and analyze performance challenges.
Don’t settle for good performance, upgrade to great performance today.
Our friends over at the Security Xploded blog have posted an extensive and exclusive interview with Steve McCanne, Gerald Combs, and Loris Degioanni, who created the market for Packet Capture "with their revolutionary creations (libpcap/tcpdump, Wireshark, winpcap)".
In the introduction, they go on to say, "One cannot imagine [the] nightmare of network administrator without Wireshark, and all those great network applications would not have seen light of the day if there was not libpcap/winpcap. In short these 3 folks simply revolutionized the field of packet capture, in turn bringing new light to computer networking field itself."
Our friends at Microsoft made it official today, as we announced that they've made us a application application acceleration hardware partner in their Microsoft Technology Centers (MTCs). The bottom line here is that Microsoft and Riverbed are close partners, and that our products can make a serious difference in the performance of their products.
Riverbed Steelhead appliances can now be seen at your local Microsoft Technology Center. Customers can use Steelhead appliances to run demos, architect solutions or build proofs of concept with Microsoft and Riverbed solution architects. Microsoft customers running applications such as SharePoint and Exchange, or using cloud services can now experience the acceleration of those applications over the WAN before they actually deploy them. That acceleration can be as much as a 50x improvement. (That's 50x and not 50%!)
We at Riverbed have felt for some time that WAN optimization is a critical part of any enterprise implementation. We couldn't be happier that Microsoft agrees with us.
Today's guest blogger is Josh Tseng, a Technical Director here at Riverbed.
There are a number of WAN optimization vendors out there, each vying for attention. Though none have been as successful as Riverbed, they all come up with different reasons for selecting their WAN optimization product. Here are five reasons why choosing Riverbed--the market leader in WAN optimization--makes sense:
1) Riverbed has more resources focused on WAN optimization than any other product vendor: As the market leader, Riverbed certainly has more resources than the smattering of small private companies in the WAN optimization market. However, this is also true when comparing Riverbed to larger vendors including Cisco. While Cisco certainly is a larger company than Riverbed, the fact remains that WAAS revenues amount to a rounding error in Cisco's financial reports. While Cisco TAC engineers are knowledgeable about networking-related issues, the fact remains that very few are actually knowledgeable about WAN optimization. If you ever need to troubleshoot issues such as CIFS op-locks or figure out how to disable default compression the XenApp Presentation server, then very few Cisco TAC engineers will understand what you are asking about.
2) Riverbed offers application-specific WAN optimization for more applications than any other vendor: Every environment uses a different set of set of enterprise applications. And the applications that employees use today may change next year as IT departments upgrade their application software. The benefit with Riverbed is that we support the broadest range of layer-7 application-specific optimizations of any WAN optimization vendor. If an application can be optimized for delivery over the WAN at all, chances are that Riverbed can do it, and do it well.
3) Only Riverbed offers WAN optimization capabilities for all environments--branch office, data center, mobile workers, VDI, private cloud, public cloud, etc. Some WAN optimization vendors claim to be "data center-centric." Others have file caching architectures that only work in branch office environments, although their mobile software client is a separate and different product. Still other vendors claim their offerings to be better for optimizing Citrix ICA traffic. The fact is that only Riverbed offers WAN optimization technology that delivers best-of-breed performance for all environments. In contrast, selecting any of these "specialist" WAN optimization products means that you will have to find a different vendor product when new requirements for other environments arise.
4) Only Riverbed WAN optimization can scale to the largest WAN environments in the world: The scaling issue is key for enterprises with more than a few remote locations. One of the common weaknesses of competitor products is their inability to scale. Competitor products may work well in an isolated lab environment or limited-scale POC, but problems and issues occur when a full deployment is attempted. Often, the scaling issues can be traced to a per-peer data store problem.
5) No one ever got fired for buying Riverbed: Of course, the saying use to be "No one ever got fired for buying Cisco," but we all know that statement is no longer true anymore. We are aware of more than a few individuals who have been promoted for choosing and deploying Riverbed. And even if that doesn't happen with your current employer, the Riverbed skills you acquire from deploying and operating Riverbed products will stay with you when you move on to your next employer, should that ever happen. In fact, we are even aware of individuals who have deployed Steelheads for three or more different employers, gaining career advancement opportunities with each transition.
Last month I wrote about assessing security risks and tradeoffs and described an alternate approach to measuring security and control in the cloud. This month I’d like to explore one aspect a bit more—encryption.
Recently a colleague asked whether encrypting data with AES-256 on our Whitewater cloud storage gateway actually matters to customers hesitant to use the cloud because of security concerns. Does encryption help overcome worries about losing control of the physical infrastructure? If encrypted data is intercepted, does that matter? Are current algorithms good enough? My colleague’s neighbor is a former VP of storage at an ISP. The gentleman insists that it’s meaningless to discuss encryption “security” without having some kind of key management strategy and plan for regular key rotation. Is he perhaps just stoking fear?
Let’s deconstruct this, beginning by separating technology from process.
AES—or, specifically, Rijndael, the algorithm that AES uses—has withstood several years of cryptographic analysis. Since its introduction in 2001, a number of attacks have been postulated. Success has been demonstrated against weakened versions of AES, where the number of cryptographic rounds was intentionally reduced. These attacks fail when attempted against AES with the full set of required rounds.
The strength of an algorithm is orthogonal to an organization’s key management approach. If you operate under the assumption that an attacker has no access to the keys—which is a perfectly acceptable stance—then your choice of algorithm derives from a number of considerations:
How long does your data need to remain confidential? (guides selection based on strength)
What quantity of data do you need to encrypt? (guides selection based on speed)
Are there sufficient products that support the algorithm? (guides selection based on availability)
Are there regulatory guidelines that narrow your range of options?
We chose AES-256 because it’s fast, it’s well tested, and it meets Federal standards (probably the same reasons everyone else chooses it, too!). A Whitewater appliance generates a unique key during installation. Whitewater uses this key to encrypt all data as it enters. Data that’s moved to a cloud bucket is thus already encrypted. Furthermore, it even flows over an encrypted channel—we use SSL to authenticate the cloud endpoint and mitigate attempted man-in-the-middle attacks.
At the cloud provider, the (encrypted) data is stored under the context of a customer account. The cloud provider doesn’t have the key, and also has no mechanism to obtain the key. So encryption eliminates the risk of clear-text interception by the provider. Furthermore, the provider’s access control mechanism makes it difficult for other customers to obtain the data. However, should that access control be breached and the data obtained nefariously, the attacker still has no access to the key, so the data is again useless.
The fundamental reason for encrypting a thing is that you have little control over how that thing is distributed or used. Thus, if the thing falls into the hands of an attacker, by encrypting it you’ve rendered it useless. Now, if an attacker somehow obtains access to your key, then even the strongest algorithm in the world can’t protect you. This should be an obvious statement. Poor key management doesn’t alter the strength of an algorithm.
So that covers the technology. What about process? Rotation of authentication keys is common because these keys are easily shared, both accidentally and maliciously. It’s quite uncommon to rotate encryption keys, though. The logistical challenges for this are rather high: you’d have to read every encrypted object, decrypt it, provably delete the object you just read, re-encrypt it with your new key, and then store it. Very time-consuming, as you can imagine. So yes, good key management is important to reduce the likelihood of the key falling into the hands of an attacker. But no, rotation isn’t part of that.
A Whitewater encryption key is tied to a customer and to a particular cloud storage bucket. Whitewater never stores the key in the cloud: so even in the worst case, if a provider experienced some kind of rare breach, an attacker would have access only to encrypted data. Without the key, such data is useless. The key itself is stored only in the appliance. Good key management discipline becomes important here, because if an appliance loses its key, the key can’t be recovered. For example, store two copies of the key at separate physical locations in locked vaults. Regularly check the integrity of the backup key copies. Also, audit each and every time a vault is opened and its key is checked or used. For even greater diversity of protection, consider escrowing the key with an independent third party.
This might seem rather simple, given the complexity of some key management processes. But how would a more detailed process be an improvement? Remember, complexity is the enemy of security. Having too many processes often invites attempts at circumvention, even by the most well minded of folks.
Encryption exists so that you can obtain a measure of confidentiality and privacy when you need to transmit and store information using systems that themselves can’t offer such assurances. So yes, encrypting data is the obvious and correct procedure to follow when using cloud storage. It’s difficult for me to understand why people would question this anymore.
Riverbed seems to be firing on all cylinders. Leading the red hot WAN optimization market with a 43% market share, winning product award after product award, and most recently Riverbed was named one of the top 3 best places to work in the San Francisco Bay Area.
It takes more than market performance to make a company a desirable place to work. What better way to find out what is behind Riverbed's great work environment then to talk directly with a few employees?
Below are the stories of 3 Riverbed employees.
Perspective from a Riverbed Advanced Support Engineer
Perspective from a Riverbed Member of Technical Staff
Perspective from a Riverbed Regional Sales Manager
On Friday, I was one of the Riverbed folks who got to attend the Amazon Web Services Summit 2011 at the New York Hilton in midtown Manhattan. Originally, this event was scheduled to be held at the much smaller Roosevelt Hotel, but when registration outstripped that venue's capacity Amazon moved it to the larger New York Hilton.
I didn't get an exact count of attendees, but the main presentation room had nearly 1000 chairs set up, and during the middle of the day, the space was pretty much full.
And the Riverbed booth, one of only a couple of dozen in the Vendor Expo, was very busy. (Yes, our candy jar helped, but there were a tremendous number of good intelligent conversations...) We had a lot of questions about our Whitewater Cloud Storage Accelerator, and about Cloud Steelhead. We also had a number of questions from people who were not familiar with what we do at all, and seemed pretty impressed.
There seemed to be general agreement that the cloud has already become incredibly important and useful (though, to be fair, the crowd was self-selecting for that point of view...), but that it can be very slow, especially when sending large files over long distances.
It really does seem that as much as enterprises need the cloud, the cloud needs Riverbed.
If this event wasn't geographically convenient for you, there are currently two more AWS Cloud Summits scheduled, one for tomorrow in London, and another the following Tuesday in San Francisco. You can see the agendas here. (They may be sold out; there will be additional events later.)
Today's guest blogger is Brad Wood, a Riverbed Global Consulting Engineer.
My job at Riverbed is working directly with end customers and sales engineers to solidify designs in complex networks. I also spend a large amount of my time looking at applications that Riverbed doesn’t have any official accelerations for, and see what we can do for a customer who needs help. Sometimes this involves taking rather creative approaches to get the needed performance, and sometimes despite our best efforts the protocol simply doesn’t optimize well. Whether it's native compression and encryption that can’t be disabled or it’s just a Chatty Cathy application we don’t get the results that we are looking for. But when we do…… It’s simply magic.
A recent example was with a feature in our latest RiOS release, SMTP/S (Simple Mail Transport Protocol), which is used for sending and receiving email messages. Our smart guys in engineering have figured out a way to negotiate a TLS (Transport Layer Security) Start in the middle of a conversation. Traditionally we have optimized SSL/TLS by catching the SSL/TLS key exchange at the beginning of the connection. Basically, this is the equivalent of "Hello, how are you, can we speak in private?" It was neat, it was simple, it was secure, and it worked.
However with SSL/TLS Explicit Start it makes life a little more difficult. It requires the ability to start a session in one protocol then switch to SSL/TLS in the middle of the existing protocol. This is analogous to starting a conversation in English and switching to Japanese in the middle of a sentence. Since we couldn't do this, it meant that we couldn’t optimize Exchange 2007 hub-to-hub traffic. So, engineering put the fingers to the keyboard and first released this feature, albeit unsupported, in 6.1 and kept the momentum going in 6.5. Late Start SSL was a dream come true for Microsoft administrators.
About a month ago I got an email from an SE asking about extending this feature to FTP/S explicit, a secure file transport protocol. I thought to myself….. Is there any reason this wouldn’t work? So off to Pilot and Wireshark I went. I narrowed down the conversation that I wanted to see in my 2GB capture with Pilot, then exported to Wireshark to look at the packet by packet play. Sure enough we saw the FTP session start in clear text, next before the authorize, a PROT command was issued. This command tells the server to start TLS, and then we saw the TLS session start, and Steelhead optimize it. It was a beautiful, especially when we saw the client’s eyes light up when the traffic went from 3-4 minutes to 20 seconds.
Although we all like to talk about the speed, my biggest concern was the overall impact to the businesses that we help. To make a long story short, this client had invested several million dollars in this particular app, and had consumers that refused to use it because of the speed. But we made it work.
Figure 1. You can see the start of the Secure FTP session and the client issuing PROT. This is followed by AUTH TLS command
Figure 2. Changing ‘decode as’ show us the SSL/TLS session being negotiated.
The end result: a very happy customer.
Sometimes it’s good to step outside of the confines of what is supported and “just see” if it’ll work. In this case, it resulted in a huge win for the technology department of this customer, and even a bigger win of the executive who had recommended the software to begin with.
“Hellooooo, Los Angeles! How ya doing?” [confused silence]
“Um, wait, what city is this again?”
Ever get that rock star feeling? You know the feeling, when you only sleep on airplanes and in hotel rooms, and your kids start accidentally calling you “Uncle Rob” instead of “Daddy,” and the TSA agents all greet you by name? The last month has been a delightful blur of industry events, customer visits, partner training, and some good fun to boot.
EMC World and Interop in Fabulous Las Vegas were massive events and Riverbed was well represented at both ends of the Strip. What struck me was not just the energy level (sky high), but also the expectations (even higher.) The first impression was reflected by the number of people that were excited to see us and talk about performance in public and private clouds, in data protection and disaster recovery, and in all their other top initiatives. The second observation was that Riverbed didn’t need to explain the basics of what we do any more; that was now well understood. Instead, customers came to us to explore in detail how we could take them to the next level of IT performance, scale, and flexibility.
From Vegas, I went straight to Disneyland – must keep the family happy somehow! The (other) Magic Kingdom continues to blow the minds of little princesses daily, aside from having “the Happiest Network on Earth.”
From Anaheim to Australia, off the plane and straight into a room with 60 Riverbed channel partners and a stunning view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We blasted through updates on our new products, new solutions, and new cloud partnership with Akamai. And since we did the very same talk the next morning in Melbourne, Sydney was just a day trip for me; talk about accelerated communications!
The following week, San Jose and Sacramento were both lovely audiences for a pair of “lunch & learn” overviews on how Riverbed is helping optimize the infrastructures for both private and public sector customers around Northern California.
Last weekend was Mendocino and Fort Bragg on the coast for some family time and car camping. In this case, R&R stood for “Riding & Raining” as the training wheels came off both literally and metaphorically.
Cap it all off with a series of customer calls in Southern California to a top automobile manufacturer, a major motion picture studio, a state university, and an international engineering and construction firm. Each audience had its own perspectives and initiatives, but despite the wide range of verticals represented, we found common value in helping all of them discover new ways to improve IT performance and streamline their respective infrastructures.
As Whitman said, “shoulder your duds, dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth.” Where shall we go next?
Today we introduced three new Whitewater cloud storage gateway models that will now allow a wider range of organizations, including small and medium businesses (SMBs), to take advantage of the benefits of cloud data protection. The new Whitewater models 510 and 710 are purpose-built for SMBs, while the Whitewater model 2010 is designed for the mid-sized enterprise and targeted use cases in the large enterprise.
Here is a link to the press release for more details.
Today (well, actually yesterday) is the start of the week-long Dell Storage Forum (formerly known as C-Drive) at the Hilton at Walt Disney World, in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. And if you take all the training into account, the Forum runs into next Saturday as well.
The two organizations have a global channel and integrator parnership for Dell's storage products, Compellent and Equallogic, enabling us to provide WAN Optimization during site-to-site replication.
We complement Dell's relationships with Brocade, Aruba Networks, and Juniper, adding WAN Optimization to the mix.
Dell places Riverbed in a partner category called Best Value Solutions, and have declared us their preferred WAN Optimization vendor.
If you're going to be attending the Dell Storage Forum this week, make sure you attend the Riverbed presentation, Accelerate Application Performance, Thursday at 1:15 at the Solutions Expo Theater Session. It'll be delivered by Rodney Caines, Riverbed Systems Engineer.
As for Social Media, DSF has it covered. They have set up a dedicated Facebook page, a dedicated Twitter ID, @DellSF, and a hashtag #DellSF11. Check them out and join the conversation even if you can't make it down to sunny Walt Disney World!
Naturally those of us at Riverbed are very excited about the opportunity and the potential of our recent partnership with Akamai. This partnership will, in time, enable the acceleration and optimization of Software as a Service-based (SaaS) applications like Salesforce.com. Today, users of these cloud-based applications can't just stick a Steelhead Appliance in someone else's data center, and so they can't get the performance that they want and expect.
Of course, we get this problem, and so do our new partners at Akamai. But it's even more exciting when the people whose job it is to examine trends in the IT marketplace look at this partnership and share our excitement.
Clearly Taneja Group analyst Ashish Nadkarni gets it. Check out his blog posting, where he lays it out and explains the issues and where our joint solution could take things. Ashish makes it clear that this joint solution will not just address performance issues across the cloud, but security issues as well.
Today’s guest blogger is Christian Lorentz, Product Marketing Manager for EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) based in Munich, Germany.
Many of Riverbed’s largest European enterprise customers have implemented centralized ERP and CRM applications, and their remote users employ an application virtualization protocol, such as RDP or ICA. Yet it is rare to find customers who have fully implemented thin clients and migrated all of their users to VDI because so many of them must support mobile users who need to access their applications and data from both branch offices and from the road.
These networking protocols (RDP and ICA) represent a significant portion of WAN traffic, but they are not the only protocols that must be managed. Other centralized applications, such as CAD and collaboration platforms, are difficult to virtualize. That is where WAN Optimization can help; it can optimize these applications and increase performance.
Yesterday, I spoke with a Riverbed customer in Germany who implemented Steelhead Appliances to consolidate his tape backup systems. He runs his backups across the WAN with results that are nothing less than spectacular: he is seeing better than 94% deduplication! What’s more, he was running SAP over his ICA connection with performance that he described as unsatisfactory. The Steelheads have sped up transactions by 30-40%, and reduced network traffic for those apps by more than 60% in the last month.
This morning, I spoke with the IT Director at another customer with construction sites all over the world connected by UTMS or 3G links. His people use AutoCAD to design new plants, and he needed a single consistent centralized implementation for all of his users on different projects. The IT Director says that the only way to get this done was with WAN Optimization; their Steelheads have reduced network traffic by more than 86%.
After that implementation was completed, they learned that Steelheads can also accelerate ICA, and so they performed some optimization tests with Navision over ICA. The result was a data reduction of more than 42%, and their users reported much better overall performance.
Riverbed competitors have a huge problem--no matter how hard they try, they just can't manage to beat Riverbed in product evaluations performed by prospective customers. The problem for these vendors is that customers are just too insistent on using fair and objective evaluation procedures. When WAN optimization products are judged using such customer-supplied evaluation criteria, that usually means Riverbed comes out on top.
A number of WAN optimization vendors have been frustrated by customer tendencies to ignore their suggestions on how to conduct product evaluations. And so they have taken matters into their own hands by paying "independent" testing companies to design their own set of test procedures. Once paid, the testing firms loyally follow orders to engineer tests that hide any weaknesses in the sponsoring vendor's product while creating a perception of a problem in the Riverbed product.
The following diagram is an obvious example of what I'm talking about. The "independent" testing firm asserts that Riverbed's symmetric optimization technology cannot be used in public cloud environments, ignoring the existence of our Cloud Steelhead product and recent Akamai announcement. A truly objective evaluation would have documented the differences between asymmetric forward caching (a technology in wide use since the 1990's) and the new generation of symmetric dual-ended WAN optimization technologies, and simply noted that Riverbed does not natively support the former. But of course, the sponsoring vendor is not interested in objectivity, and so they order the testing firm to place the Steelhead product into the asymmetric configuration for which it was not designed (without the benefit of Squid running on RSP), and to run through the testing procedure as if it were a meaningful test.
Below: "Independent" tester uses misconfigured Steelhead to demonstrate superiority of the sponsoring vendor's product
While the above shows a recent example, the fact is that over the years, a number of different Riverbed competitors have resorted to paying "independent" testing firms to rig unfair tests. In the past years, such bogus tests have not prevented sponsoring vendors from continuing to lose market share in WAN optimization. And yet Riverbed competitors continue to sponsor bogus tests such as the example above. What is more puzzling is that these sponsoring vendors seem to think they can actually fool a portion of their prospective customers with such dubious reports. It all just goes to show the level of regard they have for their customers.
