blogs.riverbed.com

Virtual Desktops Anywhere with Steelhead Mobile 3.1

Riverbed announced today Steelhead Mobile 3.1, which introduces enhancements for Citrix, Apple Mac Systems, and key enterprise applications.

Steelhead Mobile 3.1 enables even faster performance for mobile workers accessing critical business applications such as Citrix XenApp and Exchange 2010. 

Steelhead Mobile 3.1 also extends platform support to Mac environments.  Mac users now get accelerated performance for native Mac applications as well as Microsoft applications that are being virtualized on a Mac using VMware Fusion.

Here is a demo of the new Steelhead Mobile 3.1 offering

Riverbed Think Fast Demo: Windows File Sharing & SharePoint

Riverbed Named Q1 2010 Global Market Share Leader in WAN Optimization

Today Riverbed announced that it has been named by Gartner as the Q1 2010 market share leader in WAN optimization (the WOC Advanced Platform category).  In the same report, Riverbed was named the market share leader in the WOC category for 1Q 2010 based on revenue.

Q1 was a busy quarter for Riverbed from a product and technology standpoint as both consolidation and disaster recovery capabilities received a boost.

Riverbed enables additional IT consolidation opportunities by supporting branch office consolidation with the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP).

The RSP allows customers to create a branch office box (BOB) that can run up to five additional services or applications virtually in a protected partition on the Steelhead appliance. This approach allows customers to deploy a customized library of local services in all of their branch offices, without the need to deploy and maintain full-blown servers to run the applications. Riverbed has 14 qualified solutions on the RSP, including Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, and solutions from McAfee, Inc., Websense, Inc., Check Point® Software Technologies, Qumu, Infoblox Inc., and OPNET Technologies, Inc.

Whether an organization is focused on consolidating file servers, email servers, SAN or NAS devices, or remote tape backup libraries, Riverbed WAN optimization solutions will accelerate application performance, typically by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times, over the WAN, and reduce WAN bandwidth utilization, typically by 60 to 95%.

Riverbed WAN Optimization Accelerates Disaster Recovery Initiatives

During Q1 2010, Riverbed introduced the Steelhead 7050 model appliance to meet the performance, reliability and flexibility requirements of large enterprises. The Steelhead 7050 more cost-effectively manages large-scale data center-to-data center replication, accelerates applications across many locations and users in an enterprise, and allows organizations to build large private cloud infrastructures. This model combines new levels of throughput and connection scalability with solid-state drives (SSD) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) connectivity.
 
Riverbed WAN optimization solutions have been verified by Brocade Communications Systems Inc. as compatible with the Brocade 7500/FR4-18i Blade, according to the testing requirements of the Brocade Data Center Ready Program. In addition, Riverbed has partnerships with a variety of leading storage vendors, including Dell EqualLogic, Double-Take Software, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, NetApp and Symantec.
 
Most recently, Riverbed announced that as part of the EMC Select Program the company has been awarded the 2009 EMC® Partner Solution Award: Offering of the Year - Symmetrix®.

BT video spotlights WAN optimisation service based on Riverbed

BT recently posted a Virtual Expert video on AAI WOS (WAN Optimisation Service).  This is a great intro video that describes the BT offering that is based exclusively on Riverbed.  Another interesting note is that BT is not only a Riverbed partner, but also a customer as they use Riverbed internally for their WAN optimization needs.

You can access the video here http://www.globalservices.bt.com/gbl/en/page/aai_wan_virtual_expert

Riverbed Think Fast Demo - Microsoft Exchange

Riverbed Think Fast Demo - Microsoft SharePoint

Riverbed announces RiOS 6.1 update for Steelhead appliances

A big day today in technology news. On the consumer side, Apple will be unveiling their new gadgets during their worldwide developer conference in San Francisco.

Not to be outdone, Riverbed is generating excitement today in the IT landscape with the launch of the RiOS 6.1, a hefty software update to Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead appliance.

RiOS 6.1 has new optimizations for Microsoft applications like Exchange 2010 and Microsoft Online Services and storage optimizations for SRDF and FCIP. There is HA support for RSP. With this release Riverbed delivers superior acceleration across a wide variety of infrastructure, thereby providing maximum performance for any cloud, architecture or application.

Riverbed is announcing a lot of Industry Firsts with this software update.

With RiOS 6.1, Riverbed is the first WAN Optimization vendor to offer optimizations for the following:

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2010(Encrypted and Unencrypted Mode
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010
• Microsoft Online Services (Exchange Online and SharePoint Online)
• SVVP Certified for Windows Server 2008 R2
• Lotus Notes 8.5
• EMC SRDF/A Optimization (Network and Application layer) and auto-configuration

Microsoft Optimizations
Accelerating Microsoft Applications from wherever they are located. With this release, customers running Exchange 2010 can see data reductions of up to 95% and more than 34 times faster transmission thereby reducing the effects of latency. There are enhanced optimizations for Share Point that further reduces the effects of latency and speeds up response time by up to 50% over previous versions of RiOS.
This release also provides support for optimizing Microsoft Online services aka Microsoft BPOS-D like Exchange Online and Share Point Online. The optimizations work in both encrypted and unencrypted environments for Exchange 2010 and Exchange Online.

Lotus Notes Optimizations
Enhanced support for optimizing Lotus Notes v8.5. For those customers with Lotus Domino and Notes environments, RiOS 6.1 delivers latency optimizations and improved application response times thereby improving the end user experience.
Storage Optimizations

Accelerating replication and DR traffic – enabling higher levels of data reduction and throughput
Customers that use EMC's Symmetrix V-MAX and DMX will benefit from a higher data reduction and better throughput due to the SRDF optimizations in this release. This release supports "auto-disable compression" for SRDF/A allowing for even better optimization for EMC environments. This release also provides FCIP optimizations and is certified and qualified with Brocade 7500 and Cisco MDS gateways.

Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) High Availability
Improved support for RSP in HA environments. RSP has been deployed successfully as a branch office box (BOB) solution across a wide array of customers. HA support for RSP allows customers the flexibility to consolidate branch office services without impacting availability.

Improved Network Resiliency
Added support in WCCP environments. With this release Riverbed is providing added support for multiple interfaces on the Steelhead appliance to participate in WCCP groups on one or more routers. This enables two use cases - load balancing traffic across multiple interfaces and fail-over to a secondary interface when the primary interface fails.

Central Management Console
RSP Management via CMCs. The CMC now can streamline the deployment and configuration of RSP and RSP packages. The new UI shows per-appliance health and status of RSP service and individual packages. Also there is now support for up to 2,000 Steelhead appliances managed by a single CMC

For me personally, the one issue I have with this software update is why is it named "6.1". Sure feels like a 7.0 update!  Riverbed customers have access this this software update by going to support.riverbed.com.

Riverbed in HP Procurve

HP Product Manager demonstrates Riverbed inside an HP Procurve.

Steelhead mobile accelerates mobile warriors

Naveen Prabhu demonstrates Steelhead Mobile, which is Riverbed's solution for accelerating mobile worker environments.

Steelhead appliance

Kenny Quan demonstrates Riverbed's flagship WAN optimization solution, the Steelhead appliance.

Video - Riverbed discusses Verizon's managed service offering powered by Riverbed

Apurva Dave, VP of Product Marketing at Riverbed, discusses the details of the Verizon - Riverbed announcement.

It’s (still) not just about bandwidth

It’s interesting to see how much has changed in the WAN (Wide Area Network) optimisation space over the last half a decade or more, yet some things haven’t changed much. Five years ago I recall a white paper had been written on the subject titled, “It’s not just about bandwidth”. At the time bandwidth reduction was a great story and the management reports within Steelhead were great at sharing how much bandwidth had been saved, but although some organisations were able to justify the business case on bandwidth alone many struggled. Saving bandwidth which gives rise to potential cost savings or as in most cases, defers bandwidth upgrades, is only part of the story and for most, a small part of the story. The real deal only happens as we speed up data across the WAN through either optimising the transport layer or better still accelerating the applications.

Now for some readers, this may not be anything new, it’s the bread and butter or simply put the basics of good solid WAN optimisation. But each week I am faced with questions from prospects & some journalists; with the advent of fibre everywhere, surely WAN optimisation struggles to add value right? Wrong!

Admittedly, if we run dark fibre from point A to point B over a relatively short distance and we connect our IT equipment at each end, with no service provider equipment in between then yes, WAN optimisation does not necessarily have a part. Bandwidth may be in plentiful supply but, more importantly, the biggest barrier to success across the WAN is latency and with dark fibre over a relative short distance the latency will be extremely low.

Today a number of service providers are upgrading their network to fibre only, offering much higher bandwidth options, in some cases up to 100Mbps and doing so cost effectively. This is great news for consumers and businesses, there’s no question about that but even with the almighty increase in bandwidth the latencies don’t go away over night. So if the issue is the speed of light, will increasing the bandwidth make the speed of light go faster? In short, no, as it still faces the same problems it did before. We can carry more traffic, hold more video conversations make more voice over IP calls and transfer larger files, but nothing goes any faster until we resolve the latency issue.

I recall a quote from Steve McCann, CTO of Riverbed Technology that was something like “The only way to overcome the speed of light is to not make the trip in the first place”. And it stands true today, more bandwidth is good, but once any bottlenecks have been overcome through either more bandwidth or a more efficient use of bandwidth the only way to make things go faster across your WAN is to optimise traffic leveraging technology such as the Riverbed optimisation system (RIOS).

So the idea that new fibre networks from service providers will provide more bandwidth is great, and I am sure technology development will improve for many, many years to come and continuingly increase in the phenomenon of more available bandwidth. But there is as much today as there was at the beginning of Riverbed and will be for many, many years to come a place for WAN optimisation technology as part of any IT infrastructure build to accelerate the data transferred across the WAN.

What do you think?

 

Global Manufacturing company avoids WAN upgrades and accelerates Oracle

WAN Optimization, Security, and the Federal Market

For the typical enterprise customer, selecting a WAN optimization vendor usually starts with identifying solutions that do a good job accelerating the applications they care about, are scalable, and can be seamlessly deployed within their IT infrastructure.  For the government customer, there is arguably an even more important consideration that goes above and beyond speed, scalability, and simplicity and that is security.  There are 3 key security considerations for government organizations selecting a WAN optimization vendor.

1.  The existing secure infrastructure must not be weakened

Features need to be in place that ensure that as WAN optimization devices and/or software is deployed, additional security risks are not introduced. 

For example, Riverbed offers the ability to SSL encrypt the traffic between Steelhead appliances.  In addition to encrypting the traffic in flight over the WAN, Riverbed also offers the ability to encrypt the chunked data that is stored on the Steelhead appliance for optimization.  Up to 256 bit AES is supported.  The result is that with Riverbed, you get an end-to-end WAN optimization solution that is secure.

2.  You must be able to accelerate secure applications

Federal organizations that have deployed web-based applications that are SSL-encrypted, have encrypted Exchange email, or have applied SMB-signing to their file sharing environment to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks are often forced to make the trade-off between application acceleration for security.  For many WAN optimization vendors, they will simply pass this traffic through unoptimized or worse, will ask the customer to turn off security so they can achieve acceleration.

Riverbed has done a tremendous amount of engineering work to optimize and accelerate these encrypted environments.  With Riverbed, Federal organizations don't have to turn off SSL encryption, Exchange encryption, or SMB signing.  You get to have your cake and eat it too.  Accelerate your applications, while maintaining a secure environment.

3.  Must comply with federal security standards

Large government organizations, civilian agencies, and militaries deploy IT equipment that runs on networks, in data centers, in office buildings, and even in tents or vehicles to support a military endeavors.  This equipment must not only be secure, but it must comply with federal security standards including FIPS, Common Criteria, and JITC.  These federal security standard requirements are often extended to WAN optimization devices as well.

Riverbed has invested a large amount of resources to ensure that our products meet these Federal security standards.

If you are interested in finding out more about how Riverbed has been selected by government agencies around the world to accelerate applications, optimize bandwidth, consolidate IT infrastructure, and optimize disaster recovery, while doing it securely, please drop me an email.

Bob Gilbert
bob@riverbed.com

Video - End to End Network and Application Visibility

Bob Gilbert sits down with Yoav Eilat, Riverbed's Director of Product Marketing to discuss Cascade, Riverbed's solution for providing end to end network and application visibility. 

Riverbed eats it's own dogfood and saves more than $2M

In the latest edition of the Riverbed Connect podcast, Bob Gilbert chats with Tom Bakewell, Riverbed's CIO about how he is using his company's product internally to save more than 2 million dollars.  The case study is also available here for download.

Video: Global Forestry Slashes Costs with Riverbed Steelheads

A global forestry company looked to Riverbed to enable consolidation of 8 Data Centers down to 2 and 280 remote servers consolidated from the branch offices to the data centers. Application performance is 12 to 18 times faster with Riverbed.

La Porte Regional Health Systems deploys Riverbed to optimize medical imaging

La Porte Regional Health Systems selected Riverbed Steelhead appliances to optimize CIFS and GE PACS files from a remote hospital and a diagnostic center. Added benefit to running Steelheads is their nightly remote backups went from 4 hours down to 10 minutes.

Global Clinical Research firm reduces 72% data over the WAN with Riverbed

Riverbed customer able to optimize Notes and replicate a Domino database data in real-time. This customer continues its consolidation project by deploying the Riverbed Services Platform to its branch offices.

The ABCD's of WAN Optimization

What is the first thing you think of when the term "WAN optimization" is discussed?  Believe it or not, the majority of IT professionals continue to associate WAN optimization technology solely to environments where bandwidth challenges exist.  While optimizing bandwidth is indeed one of the key value propositions of WAN optimization, there are a number of additional core value propositions that in many cases present an even higher value than bandwidth savings alone.

What are these areas that WAN optimization impacts?  Instead of going down the confusing path of going over the specific areas in detail, I'll try to make it as simple as ABC or in this case, ABCD.  A for Application Acceleration, B for Bandwidth Optimization, C for Consolidation, and D for Disaster Recovery.

Application Acceleration

Let's face it.  Most business applications have been developed with the local area network in mind.  Applications ranging from Exchange to Lotus Notes to web-based applications like SharePoint, SAP, or Oracle all perform well when clients access servers over a low latency, high bandwidth LAN.  The challenge is that as soon as you extend these applications to the WAN or increase the distance between the client and the server, application performance is poor and in some cases, up to 100 times slower.  Operations that took seconds now take minutes.  The ability to provide LAN-like performance for applications that branch office and mobile workers rely on is arguably the cornerstone value proposition of WAN optimization.   

Bandwidth Optimization

As I mentioned previously, overcoming bandwidth challenges continues to be one of the key reasons to deploy WAN optimization.  Contrary to popular belief, bandwidth is not free and in fact can be very expensive.  WAN optimization essentially eliminates all the data redundancy and the result is that between 65% to 95% of traffic is eliminated from WANs.  The result is that congested links become uncongested, smaller links perform as if they were bigger, and the need to upgrade bandwidth is deferred or eliminated altogether.  Very simple to understand ROI.

Consolidation / Cloud Computing

We have seen the pendulum swing from a centralized IT infrastructure during the 70s and 80's with central mainframes to a massive build out of a distributed IT infrastructure during the 90's where 6 million plus branch offices have been equipped with local servers.  Over the past decade or so there has been a big move back to the centralized, consolidated model where organizations want to simplify their IT and cut costs by consolidating expensive to manage branch office equipment to central data centers.  Relatively recently, we are also seeing an increased interest in moving from this private cloud data center centralized environment to a public cloud environment where infrastructure is hosted by 3rd party vendors like Amazon, Microsoft, etc.  While consolidation obviously makes sense, the challenge is performance.  When you move your file servers, mail servers, and app servers thousands of miles away from your users, performance takes a beating.  WAN optimization becomes vitamin or or the pain killer for consolidation projects.  As a vitamin, WAN optimization is the essential enabler for projects where consolidation has yet to take place.  Replace branch office servers with a WAN optimization device and users in most cases won't notice a difference, even though their server is now removed from their LAN to a data center that is thousands of miles away.  WAN optimization can also be the pain killer for organizations that have already consolidated, but have performance issues.  WAN optimization is essential for the success of any consolidation project.

Disaster Recovery

One of the often misunderstood values of WAN optimization is the impact on disaster recovery and business continuity.  The value is quite simple to understand.  WAN optimization dramatically reduces the time it takes to perform data backup operations either between the branch office and the data center or between primary and backup data centers.   For example, SnapMirror operations are in many cases 30 to 50 times faster.  Operations that take 30 hours to replicate terabytes of data can be reduced to just a couple of hours.  The impact here is that organizations that are having a hard time meeting their RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) need WAN optimization.  Shorter backup and recovery times combined with the fact that you can perform backup and replication operations more often, results in a much better RTO and RPO.

There you have it.  Understanding the true value of WAN Optimization is as easy as ABCD.  Thanks to Andy Rogerson at Riverbed for coming up with this clever methodology for remembering how WAN optimization impacts IT initiatives.  I would also like to add that not all WAN optimization products are the same.  Riverbed is widely recognized as the market leader with a best of breed WAN optimization suite that has been deployed by more than 7000 customers to address application acceleration, bandwidth optimization, consolidation, and disaster recovery initiatives.

Eliminate Help Desk Headaches: Emile Rashkovich of Sentinel Real Estate

Learn how Emile Rashkovich of Sentinel Real Estate eliminated help desk calls by improving application performance with Steelhead Appliances. 

Accelerate 2010 - The Riverbed Performance Summit

We're getting deeper into planning Accelerate 2010 - The Riverbed Performance Summit. Our plans are to include a jam-packed agenda with lots of technical hands-on time and technical architecture discussions.

A few of the topics that we are considering are:

- Designing faster disaster recovery
- Building private cloud infrastructure
- Accelerating virtualization

But, I'd rather hear from YOU in terms of what you'd like to hear and work on during this conference.

What's on the top of your mind? What topics would you like to see on the agenda to ensure that Accelerate 2010 is on your calendar?

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

SharePoint - Made for the WAN?

These days, about one in three companies that I talk to use Microsoft SharePoint in at least one part of their organization. Some have made it the central source of information for their business; others are still exploring how to effectively use it. Regardless of the size of the deployment, however, it seems that performance is consistently a problem. Why is that?

SharePoint, unlike legacy Microsoft applications, was specifically written with the WAN and the Internet in mind. (In fact, if you head over to Microsoft TechNet, you can find an article called "Optimizing Office SharePoint Server for the WAN.")

Microsoft makes a nod to WAN optimization devices in general, but doesn't really talk about the extended benefits of WAN optimization. I think that ESG does a nice job of combining some of their own survey results on SharePoint with some impact analysis in their recent paper, "Why SharePoint Needs WAN Optimization Solutions."

The crux of ESG's paper is that currently SharePoint deployments are proliferating in a somewhat uncontrolled manner throughout organizations - whenever a site wants to use SharePoint, they deploy a local instance. In fact, they report that about 75% of organizations surveyed have deployed SharePoint in more than one physical location!

Instead, according to ESG, organizations should consider running it all centrally and using WAN optimization to provide the needed performance to distributed users everywhere. The end result is potentially significant cost savings by avoiding distributed systems and management. Again, based on their survey results, a majority of respondents said that with WAN optimization they experienced improved response times and more reliable data access.

We've seen organizations like Avanade, who are specialists in SharePoint, adopt WAN optimization as a key element for SharePoint, and I believe it will become more prevalent for organizations to design SharePoint systems with WAN optimization in mind. What about your organization? Do you think WAN optimization would significantly change the way you use SharePoint? Let me know your thoughts.

Faster than a speeding rollout

Well folks,

I thought we had seen it all when Bankwest, formerly part of HBOS Australia, was able to put 170 Steelhead appliances into production across Australia in only 45 days. The professionalism and dedication of Bankwest's IT staff, together with help and support from their VAR Dimension Data & the local Riverbed team helped them to achieve a very large-scale IT infrastructure rollout in a remarkably short period of time.

Of course, the Steelhead appliance's famed simple installation, product stability and ease of use, together with centralised configuration & management, including a fully automatic installation capability from the CMC probably also helped achieve this goal.  ; )

That being said however, another APAC banking customer has just recently blown this record away. A nation-wide bank in Malaysia has just deployed OVER 100 Steelhead Appliances all across the country in ONLY TEN DAYS.

Not bad for a country containing two separate regions, 11 states and about 28 million people.

Worried about swine flu at work? Work from home!

These are scary times indeed.  The latest tally is 109 swine flu cases in the US and things are likely to get worst before they get better.  Fears of a potential pandemic are beginning to hit business environments where companies are worried not only for the safety of their employees, but also the health of their business. Companies are already feeling the financial strain of the current economy and adding the potential for a wide spread pandemic presents some monumental challenges where companies need healthy employees to continue the march towards a healthy business.

From Guitar Hero to IT Hero: Activision wins with Riverbed

At last weeks SNW conference, Activision was the honoree in the category of "Innovation and Promise", due largely to their adoption of Riverbed's WAN optimization technology.

A few interesting comments from Activision's senior director of IT, Thomas Fenady:

In Fenady's favorite example of how an international video entertainment firm can pummel its network, the Dublin, Ireland-based testers and designers working on Call of Duty routinely generate approximately 200GB of data each day.

With Riverbed Technology Inc.'s Steelhead appliance, says Fenady, "we started getting about 34megs per second. We were filling up the pipe."

"What they see is a game-build transfer that could take eight hours before and now takes 30 minutes."

See the full list of SNW award winners.

Also check out the full article from Storage Magazine  (may require registration.)

Game on, my friends, game on!

The R-Team Rescues Replication

“If you have a Replication problem, if no one else can help, maybe you should call the R-Team”

As the Senior Sales Engineer for Australia (a continent the size of North America), I’ve become used to our clever Australia/New Zealand SE team solving tough problems for customers over the past 3.5 years.  However, once in a while, customers make things even more interesting by asking us to “deliver the impossible”.

Read on for more details of how the R-Team allowed an Enterprise customer to deliver EMC SRDF/A replication between States without expensive increases to WAN bandwidth.

In early 2008, the phone rang at the R-Team Australian HQ, with an interesting request from one of our large customers.  This customer, impressed with the WAN Optimization delivered by our Steelhead appliances across its Global WAN, asked if we’d be able to help with a large Disaster Recovery initiative that was facing challenges. 

The customer had just purchased two large EMC DMX Symmetrix storage arrays (one in Sydney, the other in Melbourne) and wanted to implement SRDF/A replication between the Cities for their mission critical systems.  The problem?  EMC’s detailed analysis of their rate of change of ‘track’ data on the arrays meant that they’d need an expensive and dedicated 100Mb/s link between States, while what the customer actually had was a 20Mb/s link which needed to be shared with their usual WAN traffic (Email, file sharing etc.)

Knowing that the smart Engineering team at Riverbed had incorporated the ability to optimize SRDF/A Data Replication data into RiOS™ (the Riverbed Optimization System) and that we were working together with EMC on formal SRDF/A qualification, one of my colleagues (another senior member of the Australian SE team and a Cisco CCIE) sprang into action to solve this customer's immediate challenge.  Through focus by Riverbed, our loyal customer, our storage-savvy Partner and EMC’s Australian SE team, this particular customer’s configuration was tuned and certified under EMC’s custom qualification program.

The joint EMC and Riverbed solution was a roaring success and enabled the customer to “deliver the impossible” – replicating its Enterprise systems across States via SRDF/A without increasing bandwidth - and it has been in Production since mid 2008.

    

A screen shot of Riverbed’s RiOS solution delivering 8.2X data reduction for SRDF/A data

Today, with the finalization of EMC E-Lab Qualification of Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances, delivering these kinds of benefits to EMC SRDF/A customers has become even simpler – no longer requiring custom qualification.  For details please see the following Press Release:

http://www.riverbed.com/company/news/press_releases/press_020309.php

So, do you do have a tough Replication problem?  If so, Think Fast™ and drop me a line..  The R-Team will be happy to speed into action to help in our RiOS-accelerated black and grey GMC Vandura van!

Making history....

2005

The New England Patriots win their 3^rd Superbowl.

Riverbed wins their 1^st InfoWorld Technology of the Year award for best WAN accelerator.

 

2006

Italy wins their 4^th World Cup.

Riverbed wins their 2^nd InfoWorld Technology of the Year award for best WAN accelerator.

 

2007

Boston Red Sox win their 7^th World Series.

Riverbed wins their 3^rd InfoWorld Technology of the Year award for best WAN accelerator.

 

2008

Tiger Woods wins his 14^th major championship.

Riverbed wins their 4^th InfoWorld Technology of the Year award for best WAN accelerator.

 

2009

Barack Obama becomes the 44^th president of the United States.

Riverbed wins their 5^th InfoWorld Technology of the Year award for best WAN accelerator.

 

Unbelievable success.

Read more about it on InfoWorld's website.

A day of firsts

Hello, world.  First let me introduce myself: Nik Rouda, senior marketing manager for the Steelhead appliances.  This is my first blog posting at Riverbed, and what a lot of news there is to share.  We’re doing our first quadruple product launch today: the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) 5.5, the enhanced Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), Steelhead Mobile 2.0, and new hardware models. 

With the RiOS 5.5 release we’re introducing a number of industry “first to market” features, continually extending our technological leadership and comprehensive approach.  We’re the first vendor to offer application layer performance optimization for Lotus Notes, developed alongside IBM.  We’re the first to partner with VMware and put their virtualization technology directly on a WAN optimization appliance.  We’ve added numerous performance enhancements for disaster recovery and replication.  And we’re the first to offer a completely seamless range of field upgradeable hardware from desktop to 3U models.  All of these help our customers do more with less, getting better performance and productivity while reducing operating expenses.

All of this is a result of our philosophy of putting customers first and responding to their needs for speed, scale, simplicity, and cost savings.  While our competitors’ products may feel like they’re stuck in first gear, we’re roaring along with new innovations to improve your productivity on the information superhighway.  They’re just getting to first base in offering features we’ve had for years, and we’re hitting grand slam home runs for our customers.  While the competition is stuck in the pits trying to fix problems, we’re leading the race in first place according to both Gartner and Forrester.

Today is the first day of the rest of your IT life.  Carpe diem and be the first on your block to check out all the new offerings from Riverbed.

Riverbed customer testimonial - Willis

Bogus WAN acceleration claims

Peter Sevcik and Rebecca Wetzel recently blogged on Network World about the bogus math and bogus acceleration claims that WAN acceleration vendors are making.  They make a pretty good point about the bad math being used in many cases to calculate what the X improvement is as a result of their acceleration product.  You can read about the math and suggested calculation to use here,  but the net-net is that they believe that vendors are mis-informing potential customers by making a 100X improvement look much more than a 10X improvement when it is actually closer than it appears.  They close by advising customers to ignore speed improvements above 5X and focus on more useful factors when evaluating WAN acceleration vendors.

While I agree to some extent their bad math claims, I believe they are mis-stating the importance of the performance improvement provided by WAN acceleration vendors.  At the end of the day, how important is improving the response time as close to LAN-like as possible?  Is it good enough that it is a bit faster?  I believe this largely depends on the application...

Accelerate your Voice-over-IP?

It's widely acknowledged that Riverbed provides the best performance over the WAN for key applications in mainstream use, such as CIFS, Exchange, NFS, and various web applications.  Our competitors have a tough time dealing with that, so rather than compete head-on against Riverbed, some of them attempt to distinguish themselves in other areas such VoIP, Citrix, and other real-time applications  For example, the website of one Riverbed competitor claims "Up to 1,000% Citrix ICA acceleration over the WAN, with a consistent 300%."  The same vendor makes similar claims for accelerating VoIP and RDP traffic.  When I see these claims, I'm puzzled at their choice of words.  By "acceleration", I would hope they are not claiming the ability to allow the VoIP conversationalists to talk faster.  I would also reason that they are not claiming the ability to allow real-time data to travel faster than the speed of light.  So what does it mean to achieve "1000% acceleration" of VoIP and other real-time traffic types?

What do CIOs really spend their time thinking about

I recently had the opportunity to see first hand what CIOs spend their time doing. I attended the annual technology forum of one of the 10 largest companies in the world.

Why Caching is so Old-School

"Please describe how your solution accelerates WAN transfers by caching files and emails." I review many of the RFP's that Riverbed receives from prospective customers, and this is an example of a question that I see from time-to-time. I struggle with how to respond. To me, this question is like asking a jet engine manufacturer to describe how their piston-driven propeller engines work. Or in the networking field, asking Cisco to describe how their token-ring switches work. How would you respond to a question like that?

WAN optimization so easy, your secretary or fundraiser can install it

I participated in a webinar recently with one of our partners SolidWorks and one of our joint customers, FKI Logistex. During the course of the presentation, Brian Hickle from FKI said something that is becoming a common theme with customers that experience deploying Riverbed in their environment.  Brian stated that Riverbed was remarkably easy to install.  So what's the big deal? Many WAN optimization vendors claim to have products that are easy to deploy.

Customer increases bandwidth by 462 times...holy cow!

A customer in the not-for-profit rehab business recently shared with me how they are using their Riverbed Steelhead appliances to optimize the traffic over their WAN when anti-virus signature updates have to be applied from the central data center to user's branch office and remote worker PCs.

I have to warn you that the following results are unbelievable:

Riverbed customer testimonial - Silicon Image

Peeling back the Onion on a Sales Call

It's interesting to see how "potential customer" interests have changed over the last 5 years.

In 2003, when I was first meeting with customers, talking about this product we were working on, everyone agreed that they had challenges in their network with remote users. The challenges varied — either performance of centralized applications/servers, or backing up their remote servers (ok, and a few who wanted to centralize).  But everyone blamed bandwidth as the culprit for poor performance.  Often they couldn't afford the larger links, but sometimes they had already upgraded and were scratching their heads as to why it didn't help as much as last time.

So, since they viewed it as a bandwidth problem, we'd explain our killer compression (SDR), and they'd spend 90% of the meeting focused on that, then graciously allow us to talk about what we wanted to discuss, which was how transaction prediction (and VWE) would ameliorate the effects of latency and really speed things up. Sometimes light bulbs would nearly visibly go off over people's heads, usually I got a "hm, I'm sure that'll help too, now back to SDR, what happens when..."

Later they'd test the product (as no one believed our speedup claims...remember WDS hadn't even been invented as a term and we were this dinky startup), and be amazed.  The vast amount of their speedup, of course was due to transaction prediction, the majority of the time.

So, how about 2008?  Last week I was meeting with a large financial enterprise, discussing their challenges.  They knew that latency was the root of application performance problems, and we spent most of the time talking about that (still did discuss SDR — as they'd rather not get more OC3s).  But they were puzzled with their test results — things were clearly faster (i.e. stopwatching user actions), and the reports showed dramatic bandwidth reduction on the Steelhead, but the routers reported the WAN links were still full — where were the "savings" coming from.  Anyone see the answer to this mystery?

Well, the data reduction enabled more traffic to flow, and the transaction prediction stopped applications being bottlenecked on the WAN, also enabling more traffic to flow, so...  People got more done — in the same amount of time — thus the WAN was "full again."  It's sort of Parkinson's Law experienced in a different domain (and with a more hopeful spin).

So, how far have we come?  It's mixed, the great news is that people are aware of latency and it's insidious effects.  We still have a ways to go with the second order implications of this though, i.e. that filling a WAN link can actually be a good sign.  And someone needs to come up with a way to measure ROI on knowledge workers — surely them getting more done in a day is valuable to the enterprise. 

So, what do you think...Latency*chattyness is now well understood, or still breaking news?

The Key Components of WDS

While numerous enterprises have begun deploying WDS solutions, the technology is relatively new.  Many in the IT community are still struggling to understand how WDS technology works.  Compared to say, routers and switches, and other mainstream solutions where technical expertise is readily available, there is a general lack of experts knowledgeable about how WDS solutions work.  Tragically, this has created an environment where seemingly all-knowing charlatans can spout their so-called wisdom to serve their own purposes.

Another Riverbed fan

While it can be boring and very annoying to hear a vendor continue to toot their own horn or pound their own chest about how good they are, it is a bit different when it is the customer that is doing the horn tooting.

Applications, deduplication and obfuscation

I'm at Interop this week, still fielding calls about an issue that's been simmering for some time, so I thought I'd start my blog with it...

Over the last six months Riverbed has run into an interesting issue - a collision between applications and deduplication - it turns out that one widely used application, AutoCAD, has a new file format beginning with AutoCAD 2007 that scrambles the bytes in the file every time a complete save is made, and that makes deduplicating it essentially impossible. Brian Babineau at ESG has written about this issue on his blog.

Welcome to the Think Fast blog

From our experiences interacting with the community at the WDS Forum, we know there are lively ongoing conversations about wide-area data services, acceleration, consolidation, and related topics.  We're adding one more source of information here as we initiate Think Fast, our Riverbed corporate blog. Our goal is to be concise, accurate, and helpful -- we want to extend our focus on customer success to this additional vehicle.

We love learning what really matters to you. We also really value our opportunities to explain the ideas and motivations behind our products, and their place in the larger IT universe.  We hope this blog enables more of these great interactions, and we're looking forward to them.

Mark Day, Chief Scientist, Riverbed