The Riverbed Blog

Blog Battle: Why public cloud is the future of IT

Today we are trying something different in the blog.  We are posting two articles with differing points of view.  The article below takes the position that Public Cloud is more important than the Private Cloud and should take precedent.  The other article, located here, takes the opposing viewpoint that the Private Cloud is more important should be given priority.  

We hope you will chime in with your comments and opinions in the comments.

Let the Blog Battle begin!

Why public cloud is the future of IT

Why not?  Streamline your infrastructure.  Unless you want to manage an ever-growing pile of applications, servers, and storage, the chances are public cloud offers you a better way.  Hoarding stuff under your roof is so yesterday.

Reason 1 - Cost: The traditional “own” vs. “rent” argument always comes up, but it largely misses the concept of innovation.  The downward spiral is of cyclical binge purchases, struggles to digest all that hardware, and the eventual purge.  Huge capital budgets are wasted on over-priced kit that you’ll outgrow in a couple years anyway. Take your backup storage as an example: how many different tape formats have you bought en masse?  4mm, optical disk, 8mm, DLTI, DLTIII, DLT IV, LTO 3, 4, 5….  Every time a new format came out, you probably blew a ton of cash on new hardware and media.  Don’t even get me started on hallways full of self-proclaimed “redundant” disks.  You’ve been left holding bags full of outdated and possibly unreadable data.  Far more efficient to use operating budgets for cloud services that empower you to provision only what you actually need, on demand when you actually need it. 

 

Reason 2 - Human resources: Meanwhile your staff spends their time on low-value activities like unboxing and racking and wiring and patching and repairing and replacing.  Continuing with the tape storage example, how many man-hours have been spent over the last few decades inventorying and duplicating (again!) and ejecting and off-siting and requesting and waiting for the tape before you can start a restore job?  Is that really how you want your information technology professionals spending their days?  The same class of problem carries into other IT disciplines like apps and servers.

So if you’re going to join us in the 21^st century, why not maximize the efficiency of your infrastructure by adopting public cloud services?  There’s a ton of benefit to gain from virtualizing applications and running them on consolidated infrastructure in a highly automated data center.  Just let someone else spend the capital and manpower to run that cloud data center for you!

-        First, you’re going to need to have a clear picture of what applications you have and how they are connected before making changes like migrating servers into the public cloud. Application-aware network performance management, like Riverbed Cascade, can rapidly build application dependency maps to give you visibility to benchmark performance for multi-tier applications.

-        Next, you’ll need to actually move those applications to your cloud provider’s environment, without disrupting service availability. Global load-balancing capabilities in the Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager can allow you to rewire applications in the background while maintaining service availability.  Your public cloud service will also benefit from the automation that Stingray provides in increasing application performance and reliability, and support greater server throughput for more efficient usage.  As a cloud appliance, you can easily right-size your Stingray deployment, while taking full advantage of your new infinitely scalable infrastructure.

-        Not least, you can bin the tapes entirely, by backing up to the cloud storage provider of your choice.  Whitewater offers drop-in integration with you current backup software, but encrypts and deduplicates the backup data before storing it safely in the cloud.  You can restore locally for common incidents or from the cloud in a “smoking crater” type disaster.  Win, win.

-        Finally, you’ll need to make sure users can still access applications running in the public cloud… which is probably a greater distance from your end users than local servers and data centers were before. Riverbed’s Steelhead WAN optimization technology minimizes the impact of latency – something that adding bandwidth capacity alone cannot do – so that end-users  anywhere can continue to use applications as if they were local.  As an added benefit, Cloud Steelhead and Steelhead Mobile software can reduce bandwidth consumption by 65-95%, providing efficiency and savings that can be funneled back into the business. 

While most hardware pushers slap on a “private cloud” label to keep you over-buying boxes for your data center, the real efficiency and innovation is coming from the public cloud.  We’ll help you get there!

So who's right?  Which do you think is more important to your organization?  Public or private cloud?  Let us know in the comments.

Riverbed Steelhead & Whitewater Customers Featured at Gartner Conference

Gartner will kick off its 30^th Data Center Conference amongst the glitz and glamour of beautiful Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas next week. Leading Gartner analysts such as Joe Skorupa will be covering hot issues including next-stage virtualization, the impact of cloud computing, mobility, best practices in cost optimization, managing escalating energy costs, the aging infrastructure. Additionally Riverbed customers James Hardie,  a world leader in fiber cement siding, and Psomas, a Southern-Calif.-based engineering consulting firm will present on how they are leveraging Riverbed IT performance solutions to enhance its disaster recovery capabilities.

Featured at the conference is a track titled, “Twin Goals, Unique Approaches:  Improving Data Replication, Back-Up and Storage - With the Cloud, and Without”, where Riverbed customers James Hardie and Psomas will share their IT success stories with their peers. If you’re at the conference, be sure to check out the session on Wednesday, December 7 from 11:15 - 11:45 a.m.

Here’s a bit more information:

Twin Goals, Unique Approaches:  Improving Data Replication, Back-Up and Storage - With the Cloud, and Without

For James Hardie, data protection and Disaster Recovery are paramount. So SAP data replication and failover that were running a day behind and nightly data backup replication of 18 hours+ constituted an untenable situation. Deduplication alone was not enough to improve end-to-end performance. Learn how the company has deployed WAN optimization from Riverbed Technology to reduce its RPO to one hour or less, slash backup times by almost 3X and improve bandwidth utilization from 30% to nearly 100%.

For Psomas, eliminating tape and leveraging cloud based backup and recovery are an IT priority. Cost reduction, improved business continuity, freeing administrative time for more high value activities, and achieving competitive advantage were just a few of the factors motivating the change. Learn how the company has deployed Riverbed Technology’s Whitewater cloud storage gateway and Cloud Steelhead WAN optimization technology to move to a hybrid cloud model for CAD computing that best serves its highly mobile and distributed workforce.

And please stop by our booth #30 during the show. Happy Holidays!

Riverbed 101 - An introduction video to Riverbed's products

Bob Gilbert gives a high level overview of Riverbed's products.

 

 

Riverbed in Austin, Texas at Dell World 2011

If you plan to attend Dell World from October 12–14 in Austin, Texas, then come and visit the Riverbed booth to learn about Riverbed and Dell solutions that enable customers to optimize the performance of their IT infrastructure.

As businesses, from SMB to large enterprises, continue to innovate the way they do business and adopt leading solutions for virtualization and cloud, CIOs are examining cost-effective technologies to satisfy their requirements. Moving data and applications to the cloud, data center to data center replication and disaster recovery are all key initiatives affected by virtualization and cloud computing.

Riverbed and Dell have been collaborating as strategic partners to bring IT performance solutions to customers. Specifically, Riverbed Steelhead products with Dell EqualLogic storage help optimize WAN-based iSCCI data replication. Have a read at the solution brief here. And, Riverbed Steelhead with Dell Compellent storage, delivers accelerated disaster recovery operations and increased data protection. Read more in the Compellent and Riverbed solution brief.

How are have customers deployed Riverbed and Dell, together? Here are some customer examples, from Minnwest Bank and Constangy, Brooks, & Smith, LLP.

 

Is Cloud Reality Beginning to Take Hold?

As I’ve been out talking to people about using the public cloud as a target for data protection, I continue to be surprised by how much pain many organizations regularly go through for backup and recovery, as well as the variety of methods used to protect company data. Of course, the old standby is tape, and even in my days at Data Domain, where the mantra “Tape Sucks” was like a religion, everyone was predicting the rapid demise of that 1928 invention’s role in IT. And yes, tape has lost some if its place in the market for data protection, but it continues to hang around, despite all of the pain that I hear from IT professionals about it.

Why? There are probably as many theories about that as who shot Kennedy but I think it is safe to say that tape holds on for a couple of reasons:

• Disk is still relatively expensive, even if deduped, and still complex to manage
• Some (not the majority of) regulatory requirements can best be filled by tape
• Tape is a known quantity, familiar, “better the devil you know” and all that

So people seem to make do, kludging together a patchwork of solutions to keep ahead of that dreaded backup window, often at the expense of any kind of DR planning. In fact, for most SMBs and SMEs, data protection is only a secondary part of someone’s IT job. So it doesn’t always get attacked with the same vigor and focus as other IT issues. Like I said, people make do.

But that is changing. I’ve been seeing people start to take a look at the potential of doing away with all the cost and hassle of standard data protection solutions and replacing it with the public cloud. I know about all the hype about “The Cloud” but over the course of this year, the view of the cloud I’ve seen has become more measured, with people asking deeper questions about the implications of using the cloud. For storage in particular, professionals are starting to see that not all storage lends itself as easily to the cloud. The performance implications and management difficulties of moving primary storage to the cloud has tripped up both trial customers and solution providers and has strengthened the focus for cloud storage on functions such as backup and archiving, which are much better suited for the cloud in terms of performance requirements and storage methodologies. And the majority of people in that camp are looking to jettison the shackles of tape backup and adopt cloud storage.

Mainstream backup solutions are also promoting the extension of data protection to the public cloud. Last week, I wrote about IBM recently releasing a video showing how the Riverbed® Whitewater® cloud storage gateway enables Tivoli Storage Manger users to deploy a drop-in Whitewater appliance and essentially convert all the headaches of managing a backup infrastructure into freed up capital and hours that can be spent on more pressing IT needs.

I’m sure there will be some data protection issues for which tape is a compelling solution, at least for the near future. But there’s a reason you don’t find 8-track or cassette players in cars anymore, nor video tapes available from movie rental outfits. It’s also getting more difficult to find outfits that rent hard copies of movies, and even Netflix is separating off its DVD business and applying its golden brand name to its business based on cloud streaming of videos (BTW, Netflix uses Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) for its own business).

Trends are unmistakably toward more and more use of cloud storage. As technologies like Whitewater address the difficulties and/or concerns about using the cloud, this trend can only accelerate. Will tape and disk disappear? No. But if a TSM user can drop a small box in their datacenter and essentially get access to fast, secure, infinitely scalable storage, the rules of the game have undoubtedly changed and cloud storage will command a big seat at the data protection table.  

IBM TSM Users Get Fast Track to the Cloud

IBM recently highlighted new options for data protection using Tivoli Storage Manager in a company Flash video about the benefits of cloud storage. 

The video describes how to think through a cloud strategy and how Riverbed's Whitewater cloud storage gateway enables TSM users to replace tape and disk backup with cloud storage at significant cost and management savings, all without any changes to their TSM environment.  Whitewater maximizes data transfer performance and secures data both locally and in the cloud while minimizing capacity requirements with deduplication and compression.  Essentially, Whitewater looks and acts like you have the cloud as a backup disk target right in your datacenter.

If you are one of the many TSM users that are tired of struggling with cumbersome tape or expensive disk backup systems, take a look at the video and see if Whitewater and the cloud can help address your data protection headaches.

Meet Riverbed at EMC Americas Forum 2011 - Performance Data Protection for the Cloud

Riverbed and EMC are coming to a city near you! Starting today, in Chicago, you can meet with WAN optimization and data protection experts from Riverbed at EMC Forum events, and learn how to effectively and efficiently protect your data in private, public and hybrid clouds environments. At these day-long events, you will experience keynotes, breakouts and exhibits – all focused on addressing performance for managing your data in the cloud. Riverbed executives will discuss how WAN optimization plays a critical role in a data backup cloud infrastructure, off-site data security, lowered data protection costs, optimized storage utilization and lowered TCO from automation, as well as demonstrate integrated Riverbed and EMC solutions for data protection and backup to the cloud. 

Join Riverbed at the following EMC Forum events:

• Chicago, IL – July 19
• Long Beach, CA – August 10
• Mexico City, Mexico – August 24
• New York City, N.Y. – October 6
• Boston, MA – October 20
• Toronto, Canada – November 3
• Dallas, TX – November 15

For additional information on the EMC Forum events, including event locations and registration, visit http://www.emc.com/campaign/global/forum2011/.

Also, learn more about how Riverbed and EMC work together — for your data protection needs — at http://www.riverbed.com/emc/.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - Happy Birthday United States of America

The 4^th of July, The Glorious Fourth,  Independence Day or the birthday of the United States of America  are all names that are used to recognize the day the declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress. This day marked the legal separation of the 13 colonies from Great Britain and opened new opportunities for the people of the United States to have certain unalienable rights.

 Second sentence from the Declaration of Independence states “ We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that amongst these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

 Much like the 13 colonies that declared their independence in July 4, 1776, knowledge workers should also have unalienable rights including the liberty to access data anywhere, any time without having to deal with bandwidth and latency issues which we would all agree, if not addressed, would dampen our pursuit of happiness!

 So in tribute to the 4^th let me suggest 4 ways to gain independence and performance happiness.

 1.       Know your applications and make sure to choose a WAN optimization vendor that can give you application specific acceleration.  Riverbed prides ourselves in supporting the broadest range of layer-7 application-specific optimizations of any WAN optimization vendor.  Chances are that we can improve the performance of the applications you are running

2.       Make sure that your choice supports all environments - data center, branch office, mobile workers, VDI, private cloud, public cloud, etc.  Riverbed offers WAN optimization technology that delivers best-of-breed performance for all environments eliminating the need to have different vendor interfaces, integration, and performance standards.

3.       Know where your performance issues are and have the right tools to quickly drill down to the root cause.  Riverbed’s application-aware Network Performance Management (NPM) integrated architecture gives customers robust real-time network and application performance analytics, resulting in complete top-down visibility into their network and applications. Cascade is the only NPM solution on the market that fully consolidates real-time business-level performance views with packet-level analysis all in a single data set that users can seamlessly navigate in order to quickly and accurately diagnose and troubleshoot network and application performance problems.

4.       Chose a vendor that has industry leading support. In April of this year Riverbed was recognized and certified by J.D. Power and Associates and TSIA for excellence in Global Customer Service and Support. These certifications acknowledge excellence in delivering outstanding service and support on a worldwide basis to Riverbed customers. Riverbed is one of a select few companies to receive this distinction for global certification under both the J.D. Power and Associates CTSS and the TSIA Excellence in Service Operations program in the same year.

 Typical 4^th of July tradition is to celebrate by hosting a barbeque, watching fireworks or by decorating in the colors of the American flag – red, white, and blue. For our Riverbed customer’s we encourage you to celebrate your performance independence by celebrating in the spirit of the 4^th.

 So whether you enjoy a nice steak and Steelhead, have some Cascade and cocktails, or decide to parade the streets decorated in Riverbed orange, we wish you a very happy Independence day!

It's official - businesses are doing less for disaster recovery

At Riverbed, we spend so much time along with our partners like EMC, NetApp, HP, and others talking about disaster recovery that we assume everyone has heard us by now. I've even had those awkward cocktail party moments where I start rattling off some DR story and someone says, "Yeah, you've told me that one before." Oops.

Thankfully, the folks at Forrester are refilling my cocktail story trough with new data in their report, "State Of Enterprise Disaster Recovery Preparedness, Q2 2011."

I found two trends from this report really interesting:

• Companies are reducing the number of DR sites they manage. It's no surprise that the recession has had something to do with this. And it's not a question of ROI (Companies noted on average $350,000 per hour as the cost of downtime), it's cold hard cash that's driving companies to fewer sites.
• A whopping 65% of enterprises are interested or already implementing some sort of cloud/service based DR strategy. It's driven by the instant-on, elastic capacity nature of cloud and the desire to eliminate management of additional sites.

I think that these dynamics are certainly aligned with what's been driving the interest in DR-oriented performance solutions. Customers are looking to solutions like Steelhead to cut the cost of backing up or replicating data within their private environments; they look to solutions like Whitewater to accelerate and deduplicate cloud storage environments, and finally Cloud Steelhead to accelerate compute and applications in the cloud.

Customers tend to like the idea that Riverbed has a multi-pronged approach to optimizing disaster recovery, as we have to all recognize that priorities change, budgets change, but the need to protect your business doesn't.

I'd be interested in hearing from you - has your business been investing more or less in disaster recovery this year than in the past? And are you considering cloud as a DR strategy?

What is the real value of my stored documents?

Today's guest blogger is Mark Lewis.  Mark is the Senior Director of Marketing and Alliances for Riverbed in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) for Riverbed.  He is based in London, England.

I was talking with a customer recently about his storage needs, how they had grown over the years and how they were likely to grow in to the future. Truth is, he said, “It’s difficult to know what to keep and what to dispose of, so we keep everything, just in case”!

It reminded me of the ‘man drawer’ sketch by comedian Michael McIntyre. A ‘man drawer’ is the kind of place you store batteries, even old ones you haven’t had a chance to throw away yet. You’ll store instruction manuals for appliances you no longer own, new and old light bulbs, keys from homes you don’t live in any more and, of course the most masculine device key of all, the radiator bleeding key.

 

Why do we keep all this? I have asked this question of many customers and they all agree they know they are keeping more than they need to, but the reasons are very convincing. For some it’s regulatory needs, though they admit not all documents are regulated but it’s ‘too complicated to separate them’. For others the argument of falling disk prices means the cost of storing is always coming down, excluding management of storage of course.

But how are we going to protect all that data? Even with deduplication storage technologies, the rate of growth is going to continue at a tremendous rate and more importantly what happens at the point of recovery? There are going to be a lot of old batteries, bulbs and keys to sift through or rather their business document equivalents.

One assuring bit of news are the new services being launched by various organizations such as Amazon and AT&T with many more to follow, offering backup options in a multi-tenanted environment. Some call this ‘cloud storage’.

The great news is your back up really can be someone else’s problem and with technology from organizations like Riverbed with its Whitewater appliances these third party solutions can seamlessly integrate in to any IT environment. If you want to learn more look out for a number of online seminars and trade shows taking place. Or you can read more about these solutions here

 

International Metaphor Day

Today's guest blogger is Nik Rouda.  Nik is Riverbed's Director of Marketing, Solutions and Verticals, and he writes a pretty nifty blog entry.

Though I frequently get asked, “So, what do you do for a living?” I have a hard time with this question.  I’ve found that a generic brush-off like “I work in IT” never seems to satisfy, only prompting more questions.  A more precise answer generally goes “I do product and solutions marketing on how globally connected enterprises can optimize their wide area networks, gain visibility into … Hey, where are you going?”

What’s a guy to do?  How do I answer this question without getting too nerdy or being too vague?  The best efforts seem to involve metaphors: “I’m like William Shatner in all those Priceline commercials” or “I’m a televangelist,  but I promote go-fast networking gear and I don’t use much hair gel.”  If followed quickly enough with “want another drink?” then the moment passes pretty acceptably.

Now, sometimes I’m actually talking to someone who works in technology, such as a storage administrator.  What metaphors can I use about Riverbed to get a storage guy thinking about the value of Riverbed?

Here are a few favorites:

“Companies trying to replicate all their data between data centers may find it’s like trying to force a cow through a drinking straw: everything isn’t going to fit.  Steelhead appliances greatly reduce the bandwidth requirements, just sending the fresh milk across the WAN since we’ve seen the rest of the cow before.”

“Tiering your storage for DR purposes is like picking which of your possessions to save from a burning house, a really horrible compromise that doesn’t solve the problem.  Riverbed allows you to protect everything at once, so it’s safe in the event of a disaster.”

“Buying more bandwidth to make room for replication is like building a completely new national highway system right next to the one we already have.  It would be extremely difficult to do, insanely expensive, and instantly double the cost of ongoing maintenance.  The real solution is to more efficiently use what you already have, prioritizing and reducing traffic, and minimizing congestion and collisions.”

 “The challenge of backing up data in each branch is like the pain of having to purchase a VCR for every house in America, and making everyone drive to a video store, hoping it’s easy to find the movie they had in mind, and also hoping it doesn’t get lost or damaged in the hot car.  High-speed streaming, on-demand video services like Netflix are the future, reducing cost, hassle, complexity, and risk.  Whitewater is like the Netflix of enterprise cloud backup and archive.”

 So, enough about me, what do you do for a living?  Want another drink?

Taneja Group asks, "Is cloud-enabled DR is ready for prime time?" Riverbed says YES!

(by Steve Riley and Evan Marcus)

Last month, in an article at InfoStor.com, Jeff Byrne and Jeff Boles of The Taneja Group wondered aloud, Is cloud-enabled DR ready for prime time?  Here at Riverbed, we can confidently answer yes, indeed it is.

Implementing processes and technology for disaster recovery is like going to the dentist: no one enjoys it (well, perhaps dentists and this kid do) but if you don’t do it, eventually your organization will be in a world of hurt and you might be out of a job. Jeff and Jeff quote an informal statistic that 25% of their readers have experienced unplanned outages. We hope you’ll never be part of that. If, however, someday happens to you, then with a little planning, your trip to the DR dentist will go much easier.

We agree with the claim that cloud-based DR eliminates much of the pain traditional approaches impose. While the authors correctly state that cloud-based DR is “a recipe matched to SME needs,” large enterprises, too, can derive the same benefits. In their article, Jeff and Jeff enumerate six challenges that cloud-based DR brings. We’ll briefly discuss how Riverbed’s new Whitewater Cloud Storage Accelerator Appliance (or just "Whitewater") addresses each of them.

1. Ease of Use: One of the biggest challenges that IT organizations face as they migrate DR to the cloud is that they have to change their infrastructure. They need backup utilities that speak cloud protocols. And then they still have to maintain the old stuff so that they can recover data from the existing DR infrastructure. With Whitewater you don’t have to change your existing backup product at all. You just point your current backup tool at the Whitewater’s NFS or CIFS front-end, and send the backups there just as you always have. 100% compatibility. No need to change technologies. What could be easier?
2. Security: Whitewater protects your data in transit with SSL and in storage (local and cloud) with 256-bit AES encryption. The data is never stored or transported in cleartext after it leaves its original location. The encryption key is stored in the Whitewater appliance and if something happens to the appliance, you just need to enter the key into a new appliance. And only you have the key. Not Riverbed and not the cloud provider.
3. Access: Whitewater does something very unusual in the way it handles data that has passed through it into the cloud. It keeps a local copy of the data (encrypted, of course) so that the data can be accessed locally without touching the remote cloud. The result is dramatic improvements in speed and performance when restoring cloud-based backup data. Whitewater also uses the local data store to deduplicate data that’s going out onto the cloud, reducing your cloud costs.
4. Recovery Time: Since a copy of the most recently backed up data is stored locally within Whitewater, there’s no need to perform most data restores across the cloud. When data does need to be pulled in from across the cloud, it is pulled into Whitewater deduplicated, vastly reducing the time and amount of data that must be moved. The data is reconstituted inside Whitewater and returned to the requesting application in its original form. Apart from the decrease in recovery time, users can’t tell that anything has happened to their data.
5. Recovery Effort: Administrators don’t need to change the tools that they use to recover data through a Whitewater appliance. They can use the same backup and restore utilities that they use today. The Whitewater appliance will translate between the backup protocol and the cloud protocol and retrieve the backed up data with no changes to procedures and no learning curve.
6. Provider Lock-In: Whitewater supports two cloud storage APIs today: Amazon S3 and EMC Atmos. You can easily move from one cloud to another simply by changing Whitewater’s destination.

When evaluating cloud-based DR, a question equally important to “how do I get my stuff backed up?” is “how do I get my stuff back after an outage?” This is where Whitewater really shines because of the constant movement and near-instant recovery capabilities of the cloud-via-DR-gateway architecture. How so? The authors allude to it at the end of their article:

Emerging cloud gateway vendors, when enabled by primary storage support and the ability to serve up storage from a virtual appliance, can in effect pre-stage data automatically and make it available to virtual servers in the cloud. Not all cloud gateway solutions can do this, but when they can they will further simplify the recovery process.

Whitewater can do this today. Let’s walk through a hypothetical.

Six months ago you deployed a Whitewater appliance on your network, pointed it to an Amazon S3 bucket, and retargeted your backup software to the appliance. All of your data is securely backed up offsite. Now the Bad Day happens: your phone rings incessantly, bloggers are griping about you, people paid more than you are mobbing your office. Now what? Well, since your data is already in Amazon Web Services, perhaps the AWS cloud can become your temporary data center? With Whitewater Virtual Edition you can start a compute instance that runs a virtualized appliance, import your encryption key, and obtain access to your data. Then you can start some application compute instances, extract your backed up data into live disk volumes, remap your DNS entries, and get back online.

No, it isn’t exactly point-and-click, at least not yet. But with some planning—mostly defining your compute instance types, understanding scale-out requirements, and testing application behavior—you can bring mission critical (read: revenue generating) applications into service in a matter of a few hours. With that out of the way, then, you can begin work on returning to normal.

There…that wasn’t so bad now, was it? Polish your smile—learn more about Riverbed’s cloud-based disaster recovery solutions today.

Four Brand New Whitewater Stories

Riverbed Whitewater Appliance is a new product that we introduced back in November.  It optimizes backups into the cloud, using the same kinds of deduplication and optimization that Steelhead appliances use across the WAN.  It brings tremendous security (SSL, 256-bit AES), and a huge reduction in the amount of data that flows into the cloud, while keeping a local copy of the backed up data on the appliance.  And it works with most current backup applications (NetBackup, Backup Exec).

Below you'll find four brand new videos of Riverbed customers saying great things about how easy Whitewater is to implement, and the value they've received.

Check them all out.  Each speaker discusses different benefits that he and his organization have seen.

First up, Jeff Roundtree of Pump Solutions.

 

Next it's Mitchel Weinberger, IT Manager at GeoEngineers.

 

Third, we have Jeff Cummings from Lighthouse Document Technologies.

 

And finally, we've got Ben Bailey at Applied Voice and Speech Technology.

 

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®.

NetApp and Riverbed - better together

Check out this case study about Paul Hastings law firm posted on the NetApp website. It's a great story of how Riverbed can make NetApp deployments even more powerful:

http://www.netapp.com/us/library/customer-stories/paulhastings.html

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 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.

Top 10 Reasons to Deploy WAN Optimization for Disaster Recovery

 

Short of a world-ending Eschaton epidemic of earthquakes, volcanoes, and floods like that coming in 2012, most data protection is simple: take everything and copy it somewhere far enough away so that you’ll have it when you need it — in an emergency. The challenge is how to do this in the most efficient and reliable way.

 

Un-optimized wide area network-based approaches to data backup are naturally limited by the performance of the WAN (wide area network). Bandwidth limitations and network latency can make backup take much longer than desired. For large remote offices with significant datastores, this can make WAN-based backup impossible without significant costly WAN bandwidth upgrades. Deploying WAN optimization solutions can help you protect more, recover faster, reduce risk and save money.

 

Below we provide 10 reasons to deploy WAN optimization for disaster recovery

 

10. Eliminate Backup in Branches. By effectively leveraging the wide area network for backup or replication of data in branch offices, you can save on the hardware, software, and administrative costs of local backup, tape duplication, and manual offsite transportation of tapes.

 

9. Reduce Costs. Data streamlining deduplicates WAN traffic, reducing disaster recovery bandwidth requirements by up to 95%, cutting your network costs significantly. Also the elimination of branch backup brings massive savings for every office.

 

8. Reduce Administrative Overhead. Using the WAN as your data transport mechanism instead of tapes provides automated, reliable DR operations. No more time wasted in the shuffling of tapes by IT staff (or non-IT staff for that matter!).

 

7. Reduce Security Risk. Eliminating tape transport and encrypting WAN traffic, coupled with centralized storage and role-based administration, makes passing industry and government regulatory audits much, much easier. No headline news about loss of your confidential information.

 

6. Protect More Data. By accelerating replication and backup up to 45x faster across the WAN, you can now cover not just mission-critical data, but ALL the data across your enterprise, while easily making your backup windows. This includes mobile workers laptops too.

 

5. Protect More Often. Faster DR on the WAN also translates into great improvements in your recovery point objective (RPO), reducing the amount of time and data that could have been lost since your last backup.

 

4. Recover Faster. Restore data across the WAN instantly instead of waiting for backup tapes to be found and delivered for an improved recovery time objective (RTO). Or better yet, have all your data staged and ready to go in your remote DR site. Even improve business continuity by having employees working productively from remote or temporary locations after a site disaster.

 

3. Centralize Storage or Move it to the Cloud. Whether you choose public or private cloud storage, enjoy the resilience and economies of scale for reduced costs and fast access from anywhere.

 

2. Make the Most of Your Storage Investment. Get more from your current storage hardware and software, and have the confidence of knowing that the solutions have been qualified and certified for use with Riverbed.

 

1. Have Your DR operations Play Nice with Your Business Apps. Use powerful quality of service (QoS) capabilities to match your priorities, whether you want replication to take precedence over other WAN traffic or vice versa, never slow things down.

 

To find out more about the benefits of how Riverbed WAN optimization solutions benefits DR, please visit http://www.riverbed.com/results/solutions/centralize_replicate/.

 

Steelhead appliance

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

Optimization Strategies for Disaster Recovery

Steve Dixon, Managing Director of Riverbed Technology, discusses Optimisation Strategies for Disaster Recovery

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