blogs.riverbed.com

Turner Padget CIO shares his success in deploying Riverbed

Turner Padget CIO shares his success in deploying Riverbed RSP and Steelhead Mobile for optimizing VDI for his mobile attorneys. The firm is also replicating Dell EqualLogic data to its DR site by running Steelhead appliances and the result is he is able to achieve his disaster recovery goals.

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

The Secret Value of WAN Optimization - Optimized Disaster Recovery

In one of my recent blog posts, I talked about the ABCD's of WAN Optimization where I spotlighted some of the key IT initiatives where WAN optimization provides high value.  While application acceleration, bandwidth optimization, and consolidation are IT initiatives that are becoming more aligned with WAN optimization solutions, disaster recovery (DR) tends to be an initiative that is not often thought of as being related.  This is more of a market perception, but the reality is that WAN optimization can be critical in the success of any DR or business continuity strategy.

Most DR strategies share a common goal and that is to protect data in the event of a disaster.  The data needs to be backed up and recoverable in a certain amount of time.  The amount of time it takes to recover data from a disaster or how long you can go without your application or data is the recovery time objective (RTO).  The obvious goal is to recover as quickly as possible and for some organizations, the longer it takes to recover, the more costly to their business.  Not only is there the need to recover data quickly, there is also the requirement to ensure that the data being recovered is relatively new and not data that is from several hours, days, or even weeks ago.  How much data can you afford to lose?  If you last performed a backup 18 hours ago and a disaster occurs, your backup contains data that is 18 hours old.  This is known as the recovery point objective (RPO).

There are a couple of key challenges in achieving a strict RTO and RPO.  For one, data created by organizations is ever growing and the result is that hundreds of gigabytes to multiple terabytes of data needs to be backed up daily.  Combine this hefty data backup requirement with the fact that the backup needs to go over a wide area network in order to reach the backup data center.  The inefficiencies of the network combined with the high latency cripples performance.  Big bandwidth is not the solution either.  You can invest in an OC-12 622Mps link or event a dedicated GigE connection between data centers, but organizations cannot get near the throughput they need to complete their replication jobs.  It is not uncommon to get 70Mbps of throughput out of your 622Mbps link.  If replication jobs don't complete in time, then your RTO and RPO goals are not being met.

This is where WAN optimization comes to the rescue.  Place a Riverbed Steelhead appliance at each data center and through a combination of WAN-based data de-duplication and TCP optimization techniques, organizations can dramatically increase throughput performance.  Meet replication time targets, replicate more often, and more importantly, recover from a disaster more quickly and with data that is fresher.

As timing would have it, Riverbed announced today a groundbreaking WAN optimization appliance platform for tackling even the most demanding replication jobs.  The Steelhead 7050 raises the bar when it comes to scalability and performance for tackling the most demanding DR environments.  The 7050 is also equipped to handle large hub and spoke data center to branch office environments when you are deploying a WAN optimization solution for IT consolidation.

The net-net is that WAN optimization and Riverbed in particular, should be considered for any DR initiative.  Below is a recent video covering Riverbed and disaster recovery.

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.

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.

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!

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World… so replicate, replicate, replicate, replicate.

Ok, I may be dating myself here but have you seen the 1963 United Artist's movie “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”?  One of my favorite scenes is this:

Emmeline Finch: “Oh Russell, I feel sick.”
J. Russell Finch: “Now take it easy honey, these things happen ya know.”
Mrs. Marcus: “Now what kind of an attitude is that, these things happen? They only happen because this whole country is just full of people, who when these things happen, they just say these things happen, and that's why they happen! We gotta have control of what happens to us.”

Apparently you can divide people into two types, those that say “these things just happen” and those that “gotta have control.”  Now suppose you’re responsible for disaster recovery or business continuity, which type do you want to be? 

If you’re in the “it happens” camp, could you please send me a note of your company’s ticker symbol so I can short your stock?  I’ve been looking for a good tip.

If you’re in the “have control” group, you probably get that the basic principle of data protection is take everything you need and copy it somewhere else, far enough away that it’s there when you need it.  You might also appreciate that your wide area network is a handy piece of infrastructure for moving all this data.  In fact, I’ll bet you’ve already come up with a means of protecting your business critical systems, and you might well be performing some pretty high end data center to data center replication.  Like using HDS TrueCopy, Universal Replicator, or NAS replication, for instance.  Good for you.

Now, maybe that’s still not enough.  The WAN might not have enough bandwidth, or might have too much latency, or might have other applications running on it.  Lucky you, Riverbed WAN optimization can get you out of this bind, vastly improving the performance of long distance replication.  And even better than that, Hitachi has now qualified Riverbed for use with their replication tools.  This joins our EMC SRDF/A qualification and ton of other storage partnerships, and all of these arm you with many great ways to get the disaster recovery plan you want.

Hope is not a strategy.  Be prepared.

In a disaster, number one priority is "Where are your people?"

David Spark, reporting at CIO Boot Camp at Interop in Las Vegas.

I sat down with Neal Shelley, Deputy Expert Director for Service Operations U.S. Army Information Technology Agency. He was talking with Karlin Sue Bohnert, Chief Development Officer, VP Emeritus - Abercrombie & Fitch.

Shelley works at the Pentagon and his headquarters was at the point of impact during 9/11. He was on the opposite side of the building and didn't even feel the impact. Disasters became huge learning experience. And what Shelley learned from 9/11 is in order to deal with recovery operations you must know where your people are.

For more, check out all of Riverbed's Interop '09 Las Vegas coverage.

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!

Bringing home the Gold

Riverbed has won the Gold prize in the Storage Magazine Product of the Year Competition, recognized for how our technology can greatly enhance storage solutions. It was interesting to see Cisco WAAS was not selected in the top three.

From the report:

Networking equipment GOLD AWARD: Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) 5.0
Riverbed Technology Inc.'s RiOS operating system impressed our judging panel with its ability to consolidate and simplify remote-location infrastructure. RiOS reduces the hardware footprint in remote locations by virtualizing edge services, accelerating application performance and simplifying remote-location administration. The RiOS OS powers the company's Steelhead WAN acceleration appliances, mobile client and Riverbed Services Platform (RSP).

See the full story here.

Riverbed radically reduces RPO & RTO, rocketing recovery

Really sorry about that headline, but it’s true, folks.  We’ve announced some great news recently, expanding our value in disaster recovery (DR) and business continuance.  Riverbed has always had a lot to offer for DR operations.  Our data reduction slashes the amount of network traffic needed for remote backup or replication, while our application and TCP optimizations overcome the high latency inherent to wide area networks.  What does this mean for your organization?  You can protect more data, more frequently, and recover more quickly.  You might also be able to save some money by deferring network upgrades or even reducing the size of connections between datacenters or branch offices.

Great to know, but that’s old news.  What have we done for you lately, you ask?  Well, quite a bit actually.  We’ve released the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) version 5.5, which has a ton of new DR features such as multi-core processing, adaptive compression, and memory-only data reduction.  We’ve been qualified by EMC to accelerate replication for their SRDF/A between Symmetrix arrays.  We’ve put together web seminars to educate you on the latest and greatest DR best practices, collaborating with leading storage software companies like Double-Take and top technology industry analysts like Forrester.  We’ve even seen the delivery of a must-read whitepaper by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) on “Re-Architecting Disaster Recovery Solutions Leveraging WAN Optimization Technology” (or “RADRSLWOT” for short!)

If you haven’t looked at utilizing Riverbed to improve your DR plans, now’s the time.  It doesn’t matter if you’re on the storage team or the network side of things, or even the CIO.  You can improve your RPO and RTO, and get a great ROI for the project.  Go on, rocket your recovery with Riverbed.

We would like to hear from you.  What does your disaster recovery strategy entail?  Have you thought about how WAN optimization could impact things?

Riverbed at Legal Tech 2009

"Guess what? Perrry Mason wins!"  It's not IF Perry Mason wins but HOW that provided the magic for the fictional main charecter of countless legal novels and television series.  As I prepare to head to travel from Riverbed's corporate headquarter in San Francisco to New York for LegalTech 2009 "Sir Perry Galahad Mason" seemed like an appropriate model to base my preparation for the show.  With an extensive list of legal customers including over one third of the one hundred largest law firms in the world the question is not whether Riverbed can help firms put their clients needs first but how dramatic the results can be. The flexibility of Riverbed's core architecture provides firms with the opportunity to not only enhance lawyer productivity but also ensure greater data continuity by accelerating disaster recovery and backup. 

I invite you to join me at booth 2205 for a live demo where you can see for youreself why Riverbed is the high performance IT infrastructure leader and how we can make solving your network challenges an open and shut case.

For more information about Riverbed at LegalTech 2009 please see: <http://www.riverbed.com/company/news/press_releases/press_013009.php>

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.

Top 10 Storage Inventions of All Time

Byte and Switch recently wrote about the top 10 storage inventions of all time and while I agree with most of the items on the list, they seem to have left off WAN optimization or Wide-area Data Services (WDS)!

Although data-deduplication is listed as #8, the context is with regards to data at rest and not data in flight.  This list item is obviously aimed at the specific impact that data-deduplication has on data that resides on the storage device.  There is a strong argument to be made that data-deduplication for data in-flight combined with the other performance optimizations that WDS provides has proven to be an important invention that impacts storage directly.  You might be asking how does WDS impact storage?

Data Security through WDS

Several recent events serve to highlight the importance of data security.  A short while ago Bank of New York Mellon Corp confirmed that a box of unencrypted data storage tapes that was lost by a third-party vendor responsible for transporting the data to an off-site facility.  The tapes contained the personal information of more than 4.5 million individuals.  Only a week later after the BoNY Mellon incident, State Street Bank confirmed the loss of the personal information of more than 45,000 employees and customers stored on disk.

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.

Riverbed customer testimonial - Silicon Image

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