What would Batman be without Robin?

For that matter, could Sir Edmund Hillary have scaled Mt. Everest without his trusty sherpa Tenzing Norgay? What would Led Zeppelin sound like if Jimmy Page and Robert Plant didn't have the rhythm section of John Paul Jones and John Bonham? The list goes on and on....

So what do these rhetorical questions have to do with WAN optimization and Riverbed? Well the point I am trying to make is: in order to build the next gen enterprise data center, you not only need Steelheads but a supporting cast of products like the Interceptor and the Central Management Console (CMC), not to mention the visbility and performance management provided by Cascade.

The Interceptor is a Steelhead-aware load balancer for large clustered deployments, and the CMC is a consolidated management appliance that provides a single pane of glass view for your entire Steelhead, Steelhead Mobile Controller and Interceptor deployment.

The Interceptor and CMC play a vital part in allowing for the scale and performance of WAN optimization deployments at the data center. It's not just about DC-DC replication traffic or consolidating multiple remote offices, but its doing both concurrently!

The latest releases of the Interceptor 3.0 & CMC together bring :

• Higher throughput of up to 40Gbps for clustered Steelhead deployments
• Management of up to 2000 Steelheads from a single console (..and before you ask, yes, we do have deployments that run into thousands of appliances)
• Improved load balancing algorithms to distribute connections based on the health of Steelheads - taking into account not only number of connections, but also the type of load. DC replication vs user connections for instance.

See what I mean? Sure Roger Waters parted ways with Pink Floyd, but neither faction could really recapture the masterpiece that was Dark Side of the Moon now could they?