The Riverbed Blog

Join Riverbed at AFCEA West 2012

We're making a presence at the first Federal show of the year, the West 2012 conference, which will take place January 24-26 at the San Diego Conference Center in San Diego, California. Visit the Riverbed booth (#1910) to learn about our IT performance solutions, which help defense organizations meet government mandates – to consolidate data centers, reduce costs for IT, and execute on the cloud first policy – without compromising performance.

West 2012 is co-sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute, and is the largest defense technology event on the U.S. west coast for communications, electronics, intelligence, information systems and imaging. The theme of this year’s West 2012 conference is “America’s Military at the Crossroads: What’s Out and What’s In for 2012 and Beyond?” Defense and industry leaders will discuss and debate the technologies and approaches for successful military programs this year.

For more information on the West 2012 event, visit: http://www.afcea.org/events/west/12/introduction.asp.

 

The Top Blog of 2011 -- RiOS 7.0

Time now to reveal the #1 Riverbed blog post of 2011. 

This decision is not one that we've made lightly.  We consulted with The Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Nobel Committee in Oslo, the Baseball

Writers of America, and we even interviewed people on the street.  When none of those gave us any useful guidance, we flipped some coins and rolled some multi-sided dice, and came to our final decision.

The #1 Riverbed blog of 2011 was originally published in December, and was all about the announcement of RiOS 7.0, and the series of follow-on blog articles that came after it.

The original announcement blog was followed by a series of additional blog articles and videos over the following few days that enumerated many of the exciting new features that can be found in RiOS 7.0.

You can find the additional blog articles about those features listed below:

• Accelerating Satellite WAN traffic
• Live video splitting over HTTP
• The Embedded Shark inside Your Steelhead
• Improved Virtual Desktop Acceleration
• Riverbed Loves ALL Traffic
• More details on HTTP Stream Splitting

Plus there are a series of videos and podcasts all about RiOS 7.0's new features:

• The overall announcement and discussion
• We love ALL traffic
• Video Optimization
• More on Video Optimization
• On-demand Packet Capture and Analysis

And that takes us to the end of our first-ever end-of-year review of our blog.  Thank you for staying with us.

And while we're thanking people, special thanks to Bob Gilbert (and Jasmine!), Steve Riley, and all of our regular blog contributors.  We are looking forward to another great year in the blog.

 

The Top Ten Blogs of 2011: #2 -- Jasmine the IT Kid Video

On March 27, an unusual (both in content and cuteness) video appeared both onYouTube and in

the Riverbed Blog. 

This video showed a very cute little six-year old girl named Jasmine installing a Steelhead appliance.  Truth be told, Jasmine is the daughter of Bob Gilbert, Director of Marketing here at Riverbed. 

This video became a minor viral hit in some circles, making the rounds at the IT organizations of several Riverbed customers, and receiving more than 13,000 hits on YouTube. 

Will 2012 see the return of Jasmine the IT Kid?  Only time will tell...

 

Riverbed, Five Years On

It was August 2006 and I’d been at a Cisco reseller in Sydney Australia for a couple of years. One of my more progressive customers, a law firm with a major document access issue was desperate to get into WAN Optimisation - in any form. They’d centralised their legal libraries and case documents using Hummingbird’s DM5 Document Management system and access was sloooowwww from far flung places like Perth - 60ms to Sydney and Asia - 200ms+ to Sydney! 

The reseller I worked for – a Cisco Gold reseller - was adamant that the solution would be in a teal coloured box, but alas WAAS had only just been released (having morphed from “WAFS”) and WAAS evaluation hardware was just not available in Australia. My customer said “Give me a Riverbed trial, or we’ll take our [integration] business elsewhere”!

Enter Damien Murphy our first Riverbed Systems Engineer (SE) in Australia. Damien and I met onsite, we put a quick design together, lab tested, then went for lunch. I was keen to move on from the reseller and Riverbed was hiring! About one month later and more interviews than I’ve had hot dinners, I became employee number four in Australia! Just a week prior we hired Tara Martin as our Inside Sales rep. so prior to her there were only two Riverbedders in the whole of Oz!

Five years on and I’m still a Riverbed SE! I think the best part of the job is being able to directly influence product design and features. My customers really do get what they want and it’s all included in their yearly maintenance. Also bugs or issues with a bespoke application are typically fixed in days rather than weeks or months, which makes my customers, and me, really happy!

I’ve seen Steelheads installed in 1,100 site networks, 1 site networks (plus Steelhead Mobile) and  over latencies that’d make your eyes water! Yet even after such a massive amount of Steelheads purchased and deployed, demand just keeps on growing! Riverbed’s recent foray into Storage, Network Visibility and Application Delivery Control has just made the job a whole lot more challenging – which is what every good SE deserves!

The Top Ten Blogs of 2011: #10 -- RiOS 6.5

Over the holiday period, we're going to take a look back at our 2011 blog articles, and review what we feel are the Top Ten blog articles of the year.  (Some of them will include more than one article on the same topic.) The blog articles that we choose represent a wide range of topics that we've written about through the year  We hope you'll take the time to go back and reread the original blog post.

This is a difficult task, as in many ways it's like choosing the favorite of your children.  And we may have skipped some of your favorite blog posts.  If we did, please write about them in the comments and let us know what you liked and why.

In the meantime, on behalf of all of us behind the Riverbed blog, and all of us at Riverbed, we wish you and yours a wonderful holiday season, and a happy, healthy, and safe 2012.

In the #10 spot, we go all the way back to February 7, when we introduced both RiOS 6.5 and Cascade 9.0 on the same day.  And in a related blog, we also point you to May 19, when we shared the InfoWorld review of RiOS 6.5. 

RiOS 6.5 added a number of important features to Steelheads, including:

• End-to-end Client server signing of traffic
• Native Optimizations for SMB v2 traffic
• Full-spectrum Optimization for Outlook Anywhere
• Selective Optimizations for SRDF
• Quality of Service (QoS)

While Cascade 9.0 brought tremendous maturity to Cascade through:

• Executive-level Dashboards
• SLA Reporting
• N-tier Application Discovery Wizard

And the InfoWorld review gave RiOS 6.5 a 9 out of 10.  We're still really proud of that.

Riverbed Connect Podcast #48: Advanced QoS

Bob Gilbert and Sidney Rabsatt discuss Riverbed's QoS capability that is part of the Steelhead family of WAN optimization appliances.

 

 

 

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.

Autodesk University 2011 recap

Autodesk University was lively this year with over 7000 attendees.  Those of us who attended from Riverbed had the opportunity to sit in on different sessions highlighting the importance of WAN optimization and acceleration to be used in conjunction with Autodesk solutions.

A recent whitepaper that Autodesk published “Speed collaboration using Autodesk Vault and Riverbed WAN Optimization” had the classrooms talking and customers telling their own stories.   With up to 99% reduction in file transfer time noted in the whitepaper, presenter Ross Tanner, Data Management Solutions MFG of Autodesk, said he was “shocked” as he discussed the results in his session “Go Big or Go Home!”.

We also had a chance to present to the Authorized Training Center audience on the show floor, where we discussed breaking the WAN performance barrier to an audience of Autodesk trainers.   Watch the presentation here:

 

 

RiOS 7.0: A closer look at HTTP Stream Splitting

HTTP Stream Splitting for live video is one of the many new features in RiOS 7.0.  To understand how this feature works, let's look at an example:

 

Here we have a live video stream and three users at a branch site attempting to tune in.  Without Steelhead and HTTP Stream Splitting, three identical copies of that same live video stream would be pulled down on the WAN, enough to completely take down a T1 link. Not a very scalable solution.

Now let's put Steelhead and HTTP Stream Splitting into the picture.  The Steelhead will detect that all three users are tuning in to the same live video stream and pull down only one copy.  It will then split that stream locally for everyone that is trying to tune in, no matter how many users there are.  HTTP Stream Splitting makes live video scalable.

HTTP Stream Splitting is supported for both Adobe Flash HTTP Dynamic Streaming and Microsoft Silverlight.

Announcing RiOS 7.0: Batteries Not Included

Today's guest blogger is Joe Ghory, Product Marketing Manager for Riverbed Steelhead Appliances.

In this time of celebration there are three words guaranteed to darken everyone's holiday spirits (no not "Bad Sweater Party").  The phrase that torments this season of giving is even more insidious: “Batteries not Included”. Every December 25 countless would-be revelers pull on parkas over pajamas and go in search of these crucial givers of life.  For the IT community this annual exercise in frustration illustrates an important principle of planning: considerations that may seem secondary to a project can have major consequences.
 
Monday’s release of RiOS 7.0 introduced a series of new features for virtual desktops that highlight the value of considering the impact that seemingly small deployment decisions can have on overall deployments. 

Currently Riverbed customers can overcome the performance barriers to delivering desktop virtualization for organizations utilizing Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, VMware View, and Microsoft RDP and RemoteFX.  In RiOS 7.0 we added support, for ClientDrive Mapping and ICA over SSL.  For many VDI managers decisions regarding client drive mapping fall below a long list of other considerations associated with a successful VDI roll out.  Unfortunately, what they frequently quickly discover is that when you attempt to interact with a local drive (eg USB stick), it has to read and write across the entire distance from client to host, which can lead to maddeningly slow performance.   Fortunately, with RiOS 7.0 every Who in Whoville can enjoy the benefits of local-like performance despite this distance. 

Performance is also the central focus of our ICA over SSL enhancements in RiOS 7.0.  The introduction of optimization for this deployment architecture means that managers deploying Citrix have even moreflexibility to provide users with a local like desktop experience.
 
When taken in combination with our other existing VDI features, RiOS 7.0 is the gift that keeps on giving brining performance to every good girl and boy in your enterprise.

Announcing RiOS 7.0: Accelerating the Satellites

This week we are announcing our new release of RiOS 7.0 with a series of blog articles and videos on the various features.  This is day two; we'll be focusing on Satellite Optimization in this article.  The accompanying video will discuss our new ability to optimize UDP and IPv6 among others.

In every new release of the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) Riverbed engineers diligently work to add new capabilities that make life easier for customers – and RiOS 7.0 is no exception.  This time around in addition to the new features my colleagues have already given you the inside scoop on we’ve also integrated Skipware, the satellite-specific, TCP-layer acceleration technology we acquired along with its creator, Global Protocols, only a short year ago.

For those unfamiliar, first off let me give a quick description of what Skipware is and a then a bit of background on where it’s been up thru now:

Several years ago NASA and the United States Space Command joined forces to solve the nagging performance challenges of  space-based networks.  We’re not just talking about dealing with skinny network pipes and latency (huge when you have to send a signal 22,000 miles up, 22,000 miles back), but also “dirty” links suffering from environmental problems such as weather (ever had your Dish TV reception interrupted by blowing trees and snow, right in the middle of Dancing with the Stars?).  

The result of the effort is the Space Communications Protocol Standards (SCPS). The bottom line is that SCPS helps overcome performance loss with satellite networking.

Skipware was the first commercial software implementation of SCPS and quickly became the de facto standard for government and military satellite communications.  One reason why is that Skipware delivers capabilities well beyond a simple SCPS implementation – read here for full details.

Riverbed’s WAN optimization solution is also widely used by satellite customers and we quickly realized that the combination of Steelhead + Skipware delivers a powerful one-two punch for accelerating space-based networks.  Optimization for the complete stack – from the transport layer all the way thru to the application layer – delivers the kind of experience that makes users productive – and happy. What used to take hours takes minutes.  Beyond delivering time savings (and happier users) if you consider how scarce and costly satellite bandwidth can be, Steelhead + Skipware can SAVE customers LOTS of MONEY.

Prior to RiOS 7.0, users of the solution deployed the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) on Steelhead appliances and ran Skipware on a RSP protected partition.  

NOW with RiOS 7.0, Skipware/SCPS functionality is integrated natively as a part of the Steelhead software platform.  Easier to set up.  Easier to use.  RSP is no longer required.  Beyond simplicity, this change means EVEN BETTER PERFORMANCE because SCPS in RiOS 7.0 now scales up to the maximum rate of the Steelhead appliance. It also delivers the flexibility to interoperate with legacy Skipware and other SCPS peers through Single-Ended Interception (SEI).

By the way, you don’t have to be a government or military customer to benefit from Skipware.  We’ve seen the technology successfully used by diverse satellite networking users like cruise ship lines, retail outlets, and offshore oil rigs. Anywhere there is interference, packet loss, or extremely high latency (550ms+) Steelhead and Skipware can help make possible what is otherwise impossible.

Announcing RiOS 7.0: Riverbed Connect Podcast

The following is a podcast featuring Bob Gilbert, Director of Marketing, and Naveen Prabhu, Product Marketing Manager for Steelhead Appliances, discussing the new features in RiOS 7.0. 

 

We'll have more coverage of the release of RiOS 7.0 throughout the week.

Announcing RiOS 7.0: A Little Something for Everyone

Today, Riverbed is pleased to announce the release of RiOS 7.0.  Each day this week we'll have a blog article (or two) that discusses the major new features contained in RiOS 7.0. Most of blog articles will be accompanied by a video with additional information about the feature. The press release announcing RiOS 7.0 can be found here.

In the spirit of giving during this Holiday season, Riverbed is pleased to announce RiOS 7.0, the next major release of the intelligent software brain running inside Riverbed’s market leading Steelhead WAN optimization appliances.

The release of RiOS 7 comes at the end of a fantastic 2011 for Riverbed, one in which the company’s flagship Steelhead product continued to gain momentum in the more-than-one-billion-dollar WAN Optimization market.  According to the most recent market share data from Gartner, Steelhead now boasts a commanding 51.7% market share, more than twice the next closest competitor.  For the first time, customers are selecting Steelhead more often than all other competitive alternatives combined.

RiOS 7 is a major step forward for Riverbed, though it has presented a bit of a challenge for our marketing team.  Why?  Generally major releases of RiOS can be characterized by primary themes.  For example, RiOS 6.5 was all about Quality of Service (QoS).  RiOS 6.0 was all about VDI and Citrix ICA optimization.

RiOS 7 is different in that it is comprised of several high-profile, yet equally valuable features and capabilities. Therefore, we’ve elected to use the wide range of features of RiOS 7.0 as its launch theme:  A Little Something for Everyone.

New Features Optimize Applications Customers Care About Most

VIDEO - Let’s start with an industry first for video optimization.  RiOS 7 features native live stream splitting support for Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash, no other vendor in the world supports both.  This will allow the increasing number of companies adopting video to optimize live video streaming over a global network, enabling single streams to travel across the wide area network to regional offices where multiple users can view the live stream from regional branch Steelheads sitting at the edge of the network.

UDP – With RiOS 7, Riverbed is broadening its protocol optimizations to include UDP optimization.  Often used by voice, video and disaster recovery applications, UDP represents a stable, if not growing,  percentage of overall Internet traffic.  With UDP optimization, Riverbed allows organizations to de-duplicate traffic flowing across UDP.  When combined with traditional TCP optimization, Riverbed delivers the most complete WAN optimization offering on the market.

IPv6 – RiOS 7 enables organizations to optimize traffic over IPv6.  While the move to IPv6 has been slower than many first projected, organizations know IPv6 is coming.  For a growing number of organizations, IPv6 is a reality today.

VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments have long been an area of focus for Riverbed because of the inherent performance challenges that result when separating users from their data over a network.  Today, Riverbed optimizes traffic in Citrix, VMware View and Microsoft Remote FX environments.  New in RiOS 7, Riverbed is adding acceleration and optimization capabilities known as Client Drive Mapping.  With this feature, as users plug thumb drives representing their desktop into thin client devices, Riverbed can accelerate all round trips between the thin client devices and associated centralized destinations.

PRE-POPULATION - Riverbed is enhancing pre-population capabilities over both HTTP and CIFS.  Now, IT professionals can pre-populate a video or file from a centralized location out to distributed locations world-wide, eliminating surges in traffic when content is requested company-wide.  For example, HR professionals can push an entire library of enrollment forms or compliance videos out to regional locations prior to asking employees to sign up for a new program or comply with new regulations.

INTEGRATION  - Integration is a key component of the RiOS 7 release.  Both Cascade Shark and well as Skipware are now natively embedded in Steelhead with RiOS 7.  Cascade Shark on-demand packet capture delivers greater visibility into traffic flowing across corporate networks, while Skipware gives organizations native Satellite optimization capabilities right on the Steelhead appliance.

SECURITY – RiOS 7 optimizes Encrypted Lotus Notes traffic, in addition to Microsoft Online Services traffic, delivering increased performance for messaging and collaboration solutions including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Office Live.  End-to-End Kerberos authentication support has also been added in RiOS 7.

I hope you get a chance to enjoy the “gift” that RiOS 7 is this Holiday season.  We’re quite proud of this release, and look forward to many more in the future.

Riverbed at Akamai Government Forum; Steve Riley to Present on Hybrid Cloud

With initiatives, mandates and reforms in place aimed at bringing efficiencies to government IT, it should be no surprise that over the last few months you’ve seen a lot of Riverbed at government IT conferences and events. After all, our IT performance solutions help government agencies meet initiatives, mandates and reforms – from enabling data center consolidation, to helping reduce costs for IT, and executing on the cloud first policy.

On November 16, Riverbed will be at the Akamai Government Forum, taking place at the Grand Hyatt Washington in Washington, D.C. The second annual Akamai Government Forum will focus on the latest solutions for scaling the Internet infrastructure for local, state and federal government agencies. Visit the Riverbed station to see demos and learn about our cloud performance solutions, including Steelhead WAN optimization, Stingray application delivery and Web content optimization, Cascade application-aware network performance management for traffic visibility, and Whitewater cloud storage gateways for data protection.

And, because you can’t get enough of him, Riverbed technical leader, cloud expert and aficionado Steve Riley will deliver the cloud track discussion on hybrid cloud from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. ET.

In his presentation, Steve will highlight how the performance problems associated with distance computing can be mitigated with optimization techniques designed for multiple layers: application, transport, network and storage.

Here is the teaser:

No longer just the fluff of airplane magazine articles, cloud computing is here to stay. The architectures envisioned for large public cloud providers are revolutionizing on-premises data centers, too. Hybrid clouds – clouds that utilize both public and private resources – allow agencies to spread workloads across multiple locations to satisfy distinct policy, regulatory, security and financial requirements. Hybrid clouds, like their individual counterparts, involve adding distance between users and their data. In most cases, the particular distance at any point in time is unpredictable, which will lead to inconsistent user experiences. Applications deployed in hybrid clouds often move large amounts of data across multiple internal and external providers; long waits for data transfer will affect productivity and availability.

Stop by; learn everything you need to know about optimization, acceleration and performance to meet the government IT mandates; and tell us what you thought of the conference.

 

Riverbed Customer Video - Energy Future Holdings

Michael Taccino, VP of IT & Infrastructure, Energy Future Holdings shares his experience with Riverbed's Steelhead WAN optimization and Cascade visibility products.

 

The importance of agility

 An underappreciated aspect of the Steelhead product line is that it has a diverse set of form factors and – crucially – those different packages all use the same optimization architecture, and thus interoperate. What does that mean for a customer?  It gives tremendous flexibility to adapt to changes in how data and users are distributed, without needing to cause ripple effects elsewhere in the infrastructure.  Let’s consider a simple (and common) example first before we move on to looking at the larger implications. 

Organizations often have some branch offices that are very small.  For the very smallest offices and individual users, it’s usually not hard to decide that the right solution is to use Steelhead Mobile on a laptop or workstation.  And when you get to  10-12 people in an office, both the technology and the ROI arguments for a Steelhead appliance (physical or virtual) are pretty easy to make.  But there’s an area in the middle, around 5-6 users, where there’s enough overlap of capabilities that either approach could work.  Add to this that a given office may grow or shrink enough so that the original configuration in the office may need to be replaced with a different one.

 Using the Steelhead family, these choices and changes at the branch can be accommodated with no additional impact on the data center side.  For a given workload from a given set of users, it just doesn’t matter whether they’re coming from a Steelhead appliance or Steelhead Mobile. 

 Now, if you’re only familiar with Riverbed, at this point your reaction is probably something like “so what?  Big deal!”  But let’s look at just this one scenario with the #2 vendor: their mobile client doesn’t use the same technology as their appliance, so you have to have two separate data-center infrastructures to support the branches if you have a mixture of the technologies.  And as you migrate a given branch from appliance to mobile or vice-versa, you’re changing the load on the corresponding data-center pieces. 

 That divided-technology approach means that it’s easy with the #2 vendor to be in a situation where an apparently-straightforward change at a branch gets tripped up because it exceeds the capacity of some piece of data center infrastructure.  Another layer of complexity comes from the fact that these two different technologies have different network characteristics: their appliance uses an autodiscovery mechanism somewhat like the way that Steelheads work, while their mobile client needs an explicit connection set up to its data-center counterpart.  Their appliance marketing repeatedly insists on the necessity of transparency and the avoidance of tunnels, while the mobile client uses a tunnel-based system – so it’s possible that a particular branch network configuration that works with one of the technologies simply won’t work with the other.

 It’s tempting to say that the divided-technology problem of the #2 vendor is just a typical lapse by a very large company, and that smaller competitors would have a better approach. So we look at the #3 vendor in our space, which is a private company that prides itself on only doing WAN optimization.  But they don’t have any mobile client at all!  So their theory is that you should just pretend that you don’t need WAN optimization when you’re out on the road and dealing with networks in coffee shops and hotels – exactly the opposite of most real-world experience.  And apparently when your branch is too small to support an appliance or virtual appliance, you should just stop using WAN optimization.  (All of a sudden, the #2 vendor looks really good by comparison.)

Before we leave this topic, it’s worth noting that the preceding comparison actually understates the Riverbed advantage. A further advantage comes from the fact that Steelhead Mobile and a Steelhead appliance (physical or virtual) can cooperate via branch warming. In branch warming, Steelhead Mobile and a local Steelhead appliance work together: each time a piece of "optimization vocabulary" is used by the machine running Steelhead Mobile, the mobile client and the appliance coordinate so that both have a copy.  As the mobile client is used in the branch office, their vocabularies will tend to converge.

Without spending too much time on the details of how it works, let’s talk about where it’s useful:  Sometimes there are enough people in an office to justify an appliance, but the nature of the work means that some or all of them have a significant need for mobility – often because they are salespeople, hands-on repair technicians, or field supervisors.  They can use Steelhead Mobile when they are on the road, but they stop needing a mobile license when they’re in the office, and they take the benefits of their office work (newly learned optimizations) back on the road with them when they leave. 

 Now let’s talk about the bigger picture of why this matters.  After all, your organization may not have small branches or mobile users, so that set of examples might not impress you. But the same general principle of agility through a common architecture is more broadly useful, and almost certainly can make a difference to your organization now or in a future configuration.

 A way of getting a handle on this is to list out the different “packages” of Steelhead technology:

• Physical appliance
• Virtual appliance
• Cluster of appliances (physical and/or virtual)
• Software client
• Cloud-integrated service
• “Blade” for HP switch

 All of these interoperate with each other – so it’s easy to go “physical to virtual” or vice-versa without needing to disrupt the other side of the application.  Likewise it’s easy to have a set of services growing beyond the capacity of a single appliance, or migrating into (or out of) a cloud service, without prompting a redesign or redeployment of the client side.

 Again, a comparison with the #2 vendor is illuminating. A casual examination of their WAN optimization product line would suggest a similar kind of breadth and agility. They have a variety of packages of WAN optimization technology. But it turns out that the commonality is more marketecture than architecture.  That is, they use a common branding for what are actually 3 very-different classes of products: what we might call “main”, “mobile”, and “express.”  The “mobile” products can’t interoperate at all with “main” products or with “express” products.  The “main” products and “express” products can interoperate, but only at the lower level of function supported by the “express” products.  So actually trying to use the #2 vendor products for Riverbed-like agility can lead to all sorts of unpleasant surprises, as WAN optimization functionality either doesn’t work at all (mobile/main and mobile/express combinations) or works with sharply reduced functionality and performance (main/express combinations).

IT organizations need agility and flexibility to meet changing circumstances and demands.  The Riverbed single common architecture approach for WAN optimization helps ensure that Steelhead technology can help meet that need.

Riverbed Technical Leader Steve Riley Q&A on Distributed Recentralization

Thank you for tuning in to the Federal IT Q&A series with Steve Riley, our friend for all things cloud. With this episode, we're wrapping up the series with one question and one answer. 

The question: what does the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, Cloud First policy, data protection, mobility and telework, and desktop virtualization, have in common?

The answer: Distributed recentralization. In the below video, Steve provides a history on the computing models we've experienced (i.e., mainframe, client-server and centralized computing), and talks about the direction we're moving towards - distributed recentralization. The trend is that we're moving to fewer but larger data centers. And, compared to centralized computing (creation, access and process happening in one place), with distributed decentralization, access and creation are happening in one place, and processing and storage are happening in another place. Also, with fewer data centers, these two activities are occurring at even greater distances in the past ten years. 

This is why adding a layer of intelligence to networks is critical.

 

Actually, there is one more question. What topics — within the realm of IT performance — would you like to see from us?  

 

Riverbed 101 - An introduction video to Riverbed's products

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

 

 

Riverbed Technical Leader Steve Riley Q&A on Desktop Virtualization

For this week's Federal IT Q&A with Steve Riley, we examine the considerations for agencies looking to deploy desktop virtualization, the associated considerations, the drivers, user behaviors, applications, as well as how Riverbed solutions play a critical role in ensuring the best possible user experience. 

To kick things off, Steve breaks it down about what are some of the drivers for VDI. Simply put, the consumerization of IT is high on the list. An agency can allow agents to bring in their own gear, or purchase -- with a budget -- gear, and then provide and manage a virtual desktop with applications securely. From an IT and budgetary perspective, desktop virtualization allows agencies to not have to purchase devices, manage and refresh them.

Virtual desktop is also truly enabling the dual use personal-professional device. And, as you may expect, iPads and Android-based tablets are the devices of choice. But, the beauty of VDI is it is device independent.

So, what is the Riverbed play? How is Riverbed accelerating virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)? Earlier this year, we announced continued and enhanced support for Citrix XenDesktop. At around the same time, we announced an optimization solution for Microsoft RemoteFX. And, at VMworld in the summer, we announced an upcoming partnership with Teradici, the innovator of the PC-over-IP protocol. Clearly a lot of developments around VDI with more to come.  

If you have been keeping count, then you'll know that we're approaching the end of the Federal IT Q&A series with Riverbed technical leader Steve Riley. Next week, tune in for a recap and finale discussion on how everything we discussed (data center consolidation, cloud computing, data protection, mobility and teleworking, and desktop virtualization) is tied together. 

But for now, watch the below video Q&A with Steve.

 

 

Riverbed in Orlando, Florida at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2011

Riverbed will demonstrate its IT performance leadership at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2011, taking place October 16-20 at the Walt Disney Dolphin in Orlando, Florida. Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the IT industry's largest and most strategic conference, providing business leaders with a look at the future of IT. Attendees can visit Riverbed® (booth# 309) to learn about the company’s IT performance solutions, which have been selected by more than 13,000 organizations to help consolidate IT infrastructure and reduce costs while increasing employee collaboration and productivity.

Conference attendees can learn about the Riverbed product families. In addition to its core WAN optimization solutions, Riverbed will showcase its wide range of IT performance solutions spanning application-aware network performance management (NPM), application delivery and web content optimization (WCO), and cloud data protection for back up, archive, and disaster recovery.

 

Riverbed Technical Leader Steve Riley Q&A on Telework and Mobility

Teleworking - that is this week’s federal IT initiatives topic. And, everyone who I have spoken with has an opinion on the subject. One point of debate is whether or not government agents or employees should or should not be allowed to work remotely. Regardless of your stance on the matter, I talked with Steve Riley, about how to enable a teleworking model with the user experience in mind, should the user be offered the option to work remotely.

As users work remotely or on the go, they are moving farther away from the data and applications. So naturally, the cloud seems like the perfect place to store data and application for access anywhere, from any device at any time. But, therein lies the challenge.

Data center consolidation (moving the data and application farther away from the user) + cloud first policy (mandate) + telework (remote and on the go users) = Challenges

What does Riverbed offer that enables telework models? Steelhead. It works in data centers, in the cloud, as well as on mobile devices. Steelhead Mobile is based on the same technology as our Steelhead appliances, as Cloud Steelhead, as Virtual Steelhead. Bottom line is federal IT leaders can help remote agents experience the best performance possible, as if they were working next door, even if they are located across the country.

Watch the video Q&A with Steve. As a heads up, Steve dropped a stat, citing an IDC report claiming that an Exabyte of new data is created every day. To put it into perspective, an Exabyte is 10 to the 18^th power. That is one with 18 zeros (1,000,000,000,000,000,000). That is one billion gigabytes of new data every day.

Where is all that data coming from? Users like you and me. 

 

 

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.

 

All Sharepoint. All the time.

Recently, a lot of my work has been focusing on Microsoft SharePoint 2010.  I wanted to take a moment to blog about two recent related efforts:

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 interoperability testing in Redmond

Riverbed Steelhead appliances have been optimizing Microsoft applications since the beginning, but we are getting a fresh look at improving our protocol optimization by working directly with the Microsoft Interoperability Team at the Microsoft Partner Solutions Center in Redmond, WA.  Riverbed has a lab there that we use to work with customers, but now it's great to work with Microsoft directly to get both technical teams working together.

A special thanks goes out to HP, who provided the servers and network hardware for our interoperability lab.

Riverbed booth at Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011

From the lab, I go on the road to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 in Aneheim, CA.  Our booth will be showcasing Riverbed Steelheads and the Aptimize SharePoint Accelerator.  In and out of the cloud, from document management to complete searchable websites, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 redefines the collaborative environment.  Riverbed Technology enables that capability on the WAN.

Look for the Riverbed Technology booth at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 from Oct 3-6.  Conference information can be found at http://www.mssharepointconference.com .

Riverbed Technical Lead Steve Riley Q&A on Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative

It's the final countdown – not only for 2011 Federal Fiscal Year, but also for a major phase in the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI), which is integral to the 25-point plan for reforming federal IT. By September 30, officials at federal agencies are required to complete their data center consolidation plans and to-date progress reports. The following week, the plans will be posted to CIO.gov. And, every quarter, agencies must post data centers they plan to close, as well as provide an update on what has already been closed or consolidated. A list of the data centers planned for closure to date is available here.

If you're not familiar with the FDCCI, which was launched in February 2010, the high-level on this initiative is federal agencies are required to close 800 of the U.S. government’s 2,094 data centers by 2015. To make good on that goal, 373 federal data centers will be closed by the end of 2012. 

Why is there a push to consolidate data centers? One of the key objectives is to save $3 billion annually, mainly from gaining efficiencies in energy consumption, maintenance and management of data centers. Another objective is to gain IT efficiencies across agencies and foster greater collaboration. But, this should not be done at the cost of performance, especially to the user experience.

Today's video kicks-off the first in a series of video interviews, in which I ask Steve for his perspective on a federal IT initiative – FDCCI, cloud first and cloud computing, data protection, telework and mobility, and desktop virtualization — what should federal IT leads take into consideration, and how Riverbed address challenges around IT performance for helping ensure success.

Below is the first video interview on data center consolidation. Steve discussed key areas of consideration for how to determine which data centers to consolidation based on applications and information type. He also outlined the challenges associated with moving applications and information farther away from a user, as well as how to ensure that the user experience is optimized, let alone not affected. The takeaway: when data centers are further dispersed across great distances, yet the user is staying put or they are used to accessing an application that is located on-premises, then the WAN becomes even more critical. In order to make FDCCI a success, and not impact the user experience, then federal IT leaders will want agents to feel like the application is hosted locally. In short, Riverbed accelerates the movement of data, information and applications, and eliminates latency that is often associated with computing over great distances. Why is this a consideration? With all the strides to bring efficiencies and reduce costs, ensuring that an agent's productivity is not impacted should also be tops on the list of considerations.

 

Be sure to tune in every week over the coming several weeks for more interviews with Steve.

 

The WAN of Your Dreams

Look, I know it isn't easy. Nobody likes to put themselves out there, face the fear of the unknown. Why rock the boat, right? You're probably thinking to yourself, "I'm happy with my WAN. It's a decent, hard-working WAN. Sure, there are problems, but no WAN is perfect." Now tell me something, don't you think you deserve better? Don't you deserve a WAN that makes you truly happy?

Imagine a WAN that goes above and beyond for you. A WAN that doesn't make you wait an interminable 30 seconds every time you transfer a file. A WAN that doesn't hinder your consolidation efforts with it's insufferable latency. A WAN that gives you superior application performance without dictating where your servers are?  This isn't too much to ask. 

The Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS)

The Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) is the only solution within the WAN optimization industry to  utilize four different technologies to create your perfect WAN. RiOS software powers Steelhead products through a combination of patent-pending data reduction, TCP optimization, and application-level protocol optimizations. Together, these technologies provide a comprehensive solution for true WAN compatibility. (Streamlining descriptions excerpted from the Riverbed Steelhead Product Family data sheet).

1. Data Streamlining

Data streamlining – RiOS data streamlining works across all TCP applications to reduce bandwidth   utilization, typically by 60% to 95%. Data streamlining works across file sharing, email, CAD, ERP, web-based HTTP and HTTPS applications, databases, virtual desktops, and all other applications that use TCP.

 

2. Transport Streamlining

Transport streamlining – RiOS transport streamlining reduces the number of TCP packets required to transfer data by 65% to 98%. Transport streamlining also enables the acceleration of SSL-encrypted traffic throughout the enterprise to eliminate the security and performance trade-off.

3. Application Streamlining

Application streamlining – RiOS application streamlining offers the broadest support of application-specific modules for key enterprise applications to provide additional application performance improvements on top of the data streamlining and transport streamlining optimizations performed on all TCP traffic.

4. Management Streamlining

Management streamlining – RiOS enables easy deployment through auto-discovery of peers and auto-interception of traffic, with no reconfiguration of clients, servers, or routers. Simple integration into the network has led to Riverbed deployments in a vast array of network environments and topologies including, but not limited to, MPLS, VoIP, video conferencing, QoS, VPN, satellite infrastructure, ATM, frame relay, microwave, and wireless. 

Riverbed is committed to helping you find the WAN of your dreams, and with over 10,000 customers, we are confident that we can.  So begin your Riverbed experience register today for a free trial. After all, over 80 of the Fortune 100 can't be wrong. Hurry, your perfect WAN is waiting!

Bandwidth Confessionals

Hello Riverbed followers...my name is Sabrina and I just recently joined the Riverbed blogging team. I am a business development rep, as part of the corporate sales team, in San Francisco. My day consists of calling prospective customers and uncovering opportunities for our regional sales managers in the Southeast region (I'm that person who calls and interrupts your workday to find out if you are interested in Riverbed's solutions).  I'm very excited to be contributing to our blog and hope you will enjoy my perspective and insights. Now, without further ado, my first post...

 

I'm going to ask you a question and I want an honest answer. This is a safe space, no judgement here.  Ok, ready?  Have you ever upgraded your bandwidth , even though you knew it wasn't going to solve your latency problems? 

If you said yes, it's okay. Everybody has done it and it's nothing to be ashamed of. Your intentions were good, and besides, it gave you a reprieve from all those user complaints. But then, after awhile, they started again, didn't they? 

And now you are right back where you started from, thinking about going back to bandwidth. Do you really think things will be different this time? Sure, there will be the honeymoon period, but eventually you will be right back where you started, broken promises and shattered dreams. I'm begging you, don't do it, don't go back to bandwidth!

As much as you want it to, bandwidth will not solve your problems. I know it's comfortable, it's safe,   everybody knows bandwidth, but it's not right for you. Is bandwidth going to address all those TCP applications whose chatty behavior is causing your end users to waste valuable time waiting for apps to load or files to transfer? And do you honestly believe bandwidth will ever be able to address the latency problem? I don't care how big your pipe is, those applications still need to go back and forth across the WAN and having more space will only make their trip more comfortable, not faster.

Imagine you have to transport 100 of your employees from HQ to a remote office that is 3,000 miles away. You want to get all of them there as quickly as possible. You have two travel options:

1) A volkswagon bug and a four-lane high way, or... 

2) A Greyhound bus and a single lane highway.

Option 2 right? It's a no-brainer. The situation is no different with your WAN. Upgrading bandwidth is like choosing option 1 and implementing a WAN optimization solution is like choosing option 2.

 

What about cost you say?    This chart shows the  calculations done by the law firm Allen Matkins. They found that "the cost of deploying the Riverbed Steelhead solution would be 70% less expensive than the cost of implementing a bandwidth upgrade. Annual operating costs for the Riverbed Steelhead solution are a staggering 88% less expensive than the bandwidth upgrade.(Case Study: AllenMatkins).

I'm glad we were able to have this little chat today. I care about you,everybody here at Riverbed cares, and we don't want to see you go back to bandwidth. You deserve so much better.

 

Calculate your companies potential bandwidth savings by using our ROI Calculator

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Challenges with Mobility and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

As a commuter heading into San Francisco on BART for the past several years,  I feel as though I have actually witnessed a revolution. 

Just a few years ago, the common commuter either slept, read (books, newspapers, magazines), or stared in the distance.  Occasionally someone might take or make a call, or possibly send a text or two (I loved my nokia 8210, so small!).  

Today, however, the most common pose is a near constant stare at our smart phones or connected device.

I’m as guilty as the next person, pounding away updates on my Blackberry.  But the behavioral change is fascinating to me. Will it always  be like this?  Is this just a phase or are we forever committing to our screens?

Sidestepping the discussion about whether or not you think smartphones actually make us dumb, the proliferation of devices has got me thinking about the impact these devices have on IT. 

The challenge of mobile devices was particularly evident at an event I attended a few weeks ago, it was a customer advisory council meeting for a very successful regional value added reseller (VAR) in the Southeast.  The company had assembled 15 of their top customers to discuss best practices and new technologies.

By a show of hands, the greatest challenge the group faced was the explosion of end user devices and the impact the devices were having on corporate networks and on IT support.  One attendee discussed how their organization had gone so far to embrace end user choice that their company actually issues a hardware/device stipend to all new employees rather than supplying a laptop or desktop. The end user could buy the laptop, phone or pad of their choice, while IT focused on providing support and making sure their networks could handle surging amounts of traffic.

All this lead to a very lengthy discussion about Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) - (you can find some very honest and comprehensive discussions about VDI here).  VDI is a topic near and dear to Riverbed customers since at the core of the VDI concept is the explicit separation of end users from their data. And as we’ve learned from client-server applications that run over wide area networks, any time you separate end users from their data, especially over great distances, performance can really suffer, and WAN optimization technology is required to deliver the level of performance users demand.

Based on some partner and customer research I conducted earlier this year, I found that today’s most successful VDI deployments take place on local area networks (LAN), often deployed in a single facility or campus.  Education, Government agencies, and various types of financial service companies are particularly attracted to VDI’s promise of controlled, single instance data.  And while early desktop virtualization pitches promoted the cost benefits of VDI, many studies have since shown the cost benefits are minimal.  The real primary attraction of VDI is the age-old IT attraction of centralized control.

However, the challenge of VDI is most evident is over wide area networks (WAN).  If you’ve ever been frustrated by a pause in sending an e-mail or opening an application in a traditional corporate office, try sitting across a WAN from your data on a dumb terminal when you begin to experience slow or inconsistent K..EY..S.T…ROKE..S, forget it, it’s the worst. VDI over the WAN is a real challenge, which is why Riverbed is spending so much time and energy on the subject.  Today, we already optimize the Citrix ICA protocol and we help our customers optimize VMware view deployments as well using RDP optimization. 

During his keynote at Citrix Synergy in May, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton discussed a future where users would enjoy device and network independence.  I think we’re still a ways off from that, but I’m certain Riverbed will help the world get there. 

And for all my fellow BART commuters staring at your phones, just be thankful there are companies like Riverbed hard at work optimizing your corporate and public networks so you don’t miss a post, tweet, blog, text, request e-mail, video….

Did you know Worldwide smart phone shipments increased 87% in the last 12 months

 

Kicking the Tires in a Lab

As engineers we enjoy getting under the hood of a new solution and getting our hands dirty. In some cases, you might even get paid to conduct studies or tests. While there is no more interesting scenario to analyze a solution than in production, some times we have to study solutions in a lab.

When a potential client mentions a robust lab study to base purchasing decisions or recommendations on I tend to get a little worried. Primarily, because testing WAN optimization in a lab doesn’t typically expose the complexities of production environments.  Furthermore, testing WAN optimization isn’t as straight-forward or as well understood as other standardized technologies. For starters, many of the popular automated test tools don’t support the application layer (OSI Layer 5-7) fluency needed to properly evaluate application acceleration for protocols like MAPI, CIFS, NFS, etc. Next, the boilerplate content in these tools doesn’t represent production datasets at the byte level so the ‘out-of-the-box’ deduplication test results aren’t representative. Many times the test tools are measuring per-packet or inter-packet metrics, while WAN optimizers are focused on per-transaction optimization by proxying TCP connections…which means we have three different sets of packets per transaction (client-side, inner channel & server-side).  So the test tool ‘timing’ reports aren’t always applicable or representative of the actual user experience.  Not to mention the application security infrastructure and requirements in a lab may not mirror the production environment (I.E. encrypted Outlook/Exchange, CIFS SMB Signing, Kerberos/NTLMv2 authentication, SSL requires smart-cards, etc).  These are just a few of the many hurdles you need to be aware of in test environments.

So now that we’ve discussed the challenges, let’s look at how you can structure a reasonable test lab for WAN Optimization…although in my opinion there is no substitute for production testing.  First, we need to emulate the production network performance characteristics in a dependable WAN Emulator, such as Apposite’s Linktropy. Next, we need to thoroughly understand the production applications on the real network so we know what to test and how to properly configure the test resources. If possible, setup a test client lab that connects to production servers so you don’t have to worry about building or configuring test servers. Don’t forget to check the applications’ security architecture such as settings for authentication, encryption and domain integration…many times these settings either make or break WAN optimization project success in production. Next, understanding the most common transactions for these applications will help us define individual test cases. Getting adequate sample content and data for these test transactions will provide the basis for measuring the effectiveness of deduplication.  The more samples/content the more representative your results will be. To test deduplication you’ll want to setup initial and subsequent test runs with the same or similar datasets. Typically, these are called cold, warm and partially warm tests.  For testing common applications like CIFS and HTTP you can use Riverbed’s Riverbench software to record time and throughput metrics, just ask your Riverbed Sales Engineer for a copy. A great place to find free performance test tools is Open Source Testing. If needed, setup test cases for the other features of the WAN optimization solution you’re considering.  Commonly these are Quality of Service, visibility, virtualization, etc. 

Prior to starting any testing thoroughly baseline the environment so you can work out any wrinkles…there is nothing more frustrating than starting formal testing only to find misconfigured speed/duplex settings or interface queues that are too short.

For post-test analysis you should use packet capture tools such as Pilot, Shark, and Wireshark to capture packets on the client-side, WAN and server-side of the WAN optimizers during each test. This will allow you to very quickly dive into the intricate details, and have hard data to backup the test results should they come into question.

In 2007 Network World setup their first WAN optimization test lab. There were gracious enough to put together a podcast on how they did it and the lessons learned along the way. I highly suggest you take the time to learn from it prior to setting up your own test lab for WAN optimization. 

When in doubt consult your Riverbed Sales Engineer.  They have extensive experience in testing WAN optimization and can be quite helpful.

Eleanor Roosevelt said it best - “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”

 

Riverbed's Optimization Solutions for the Cloud

Recently I saw a blog post on ReadWriteWeb / Cloud by David Strom where he described the roles that WAN Optimization can play in helping accelerate Cloud-based IT services.

This has long been an area of attention at Riverbed; for years now we have been helping Enterprises address and solve the challenges they've faced with business applications performing poorly across their private WANs. Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead family of WAN Optimization appliances have held a leading position in the global market for the last several years, according to several leading industry analyst firms.

Now, in the era of Cloud-based IT services, the performance problems created by the increased distance between users and their data, combined with the lack of QoS and un-guaranteed internet performance are significantly worse than those faced within a structured and well-known corporate IT environment. Thus the need for performance optimization in these cloud environments is even greater than in traditional, private corporate IT.

These requirements have prompted Riverbed to develop and offer a whole range of products and technologies, to address the vast majority of Cloud-based IT applications and environments. In his recent blog post,  David mentioned only one Riverbed product in this context, the Steelhead Appliance.  

In addition to this though Riverbed also has the following products available to address the Acceleration & Optimization needs of virtual and cloud environments :

1. Virtual Steelhead - as the name suggests, a virtual version of the Steelhead product that can be run on VMWare ESX/ESXi platforms
2. Cloud Steelhead - Steelhead WAN Optimization + simple portal-based management, On-demand instantiation, easy cloning, fliexible sizing and pricing
3. Riverbed Whitewater - a single-ended Cloud Storage Gateway that delivers speed, security, cost-efficiency and ease of use for Cloud-based storage services and of course
4. Steelhead Mobile - PC and MAC client acceleration software, so you can enjoy accelerated cloud IT services from anywhere, over any connectivity medium.

Additionally with the recent acquisition of both Zeus and Aptimize, Riverbed now also has two new Single-Ended technologies - Application Delivery Controller and Web Content Optimization - to help accelerate  both public and private cloud-based web content and applications.

So in summary, Riverbed really should be your first port of call for any cloud IT service acceleration & optimization requirements.

Optimizing Anti-Virus Updates with Riverbed

Implementing an anti-virus platform can be a strain on your network when the PCs you are aiming to protect require frequent virus definition updates from a central location.  Riverbed's Steelhead family of WAN optimization products performs well when it comes to minimizing the impact that anti-virus software has on your wide area network.  Steelhead can dramatically reduce the amount of data traversing your WAN for the initial anti-virus deployment as well as the frequent follow-on updates that take place.

Thanks to Riverbed Channel SE Emmanual Forgues, below are the results from deploying Riverbed in an environment where Kapersky ant-virus is configured.

The setup is pretty straightforward and involves a branch office connecting to a datacenter over a 2Mbps WAN link with 80ms RTT latency.  

 
The first test is the initial deployment of the Kapersky anti-virus platform from the server in the datacenter to the workstation in the branch office. 

As you can see from the above Steelhead appliance report, 43% of the traffic for the initial anti-virus deployment was eliminated from the WAN.  This is essentially the effect of applying on-the-fly LZ compression to the data.

The next step is to attempt the same deployment now that the Steelhead appliances have seen the data.

 
 

  The result is 96% data reduction!  The next test is to attempt an anti-virus update for the first time.

 

27% data reduction on the first pass.  Now let's try another update.

60% data reduction or only 98.3MB was transferred over the WAN out of 47.7MB of possible data.  To summarize, both anti-virus deployments and follow on definition updates can be receive a tremendous amount of optimization by Riverbed.

This was a test using Kapersky Anti-Virus.  Riverbed customers are seeing similar results with other products such as McAfeee and Symantec. Regardless of your anti-vrisu platform, Riverbed can be an essential part of your anti-virus deployment strategy. 

 

Flow International Corporation: Disaster Recovery in near real time from Riverbed

With a centralized ERP system and three-quarters of its business coming from outside the United States,  Flow International Corporation needed to improve ERP access for remote users. It also needed to ensure the integrity of its disaster recovery processes, which use EMC RecoverPoint and Microsoft Data Protection Manager and generate terabytes of data that must travel over the company’s WAN.

By deploying Steelhead WAN optimization appliances at its headquarters, disaster recovery center and major regional data centers worldwide, Flow International ensures speedy access to the ERP system from its international offices. The Riverbed solution also optimizes the company’s disaster recovery operations.

The data compression performed by the Steelhead appliances complements that done by RecoverPoint. Replication traffic (both RecoverPoint and DPM) has been optimized by 95 percent. Originally, Flow set a goal of replicating the ERP data within 30 minutes. The company now replicates that data in five seconds. Overall Flow International has experienced a total data reduction on the WAN of 86 percent and has realized a 7.94 times optimized bandwidth capacity increase.

You can read the whole story here.

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!

Upgrading Performance From Good to Great

As a sales engineer, clients commonly ask me ‘what else could we do to improve application performance over the WAN?’ I normally respond with something like, “Keeping the network available and using WAN acceleration to make applications faster provides good performance. However, integrated application-layer Quality of Service (QoS) and robust performance visibility provides GREAT performance.”  QoS enables predictable performance over the WAN. Robust performance visibility provides the ability to efficiently solve problems.  If you want a worry-free WAN, in which business applications run well even under the heaviest utilization loads, then today’s blog post is for you.

Earlier this year, RiOS 6.5 was released with a major QoS overhaul.  This included application-layer classification via AppFlow; basic/advanced modes with robust traffic shaping improvements; and workflow improvements to save tons of time. If you want to ensure your precious WAN resources are mapped to strategic priorities, then RiOS 6.5 is your new best friend. With it customers can easily control tricky recreational applications, enterprise port hopping applications like Microsoft Exchange/Outlook’s RPC, and UDP-based Voice/Video.  This is a huge benefit for triple-play networks where balancing the simultaneous demand of voice, video, and data can be daunting. While QoS isn’t sexy, it enables customers to ensure performance when the WAN is most heavily utilized…instead of getting a call complaining about application problems just as they’re sitting down for dinner with the family. 

While customers could use router-based QoS, they’ll find deploying WAN Acceleration and QoS in two different devices is less than ideal. Application-layer classification is critical in today’s networks where many applications tunnel over HTTP or port hop (Outlook/Exchange, VoIP, etc). Applying application layer QoS is the biggest challenge for enterprises since the WAN Accelerator obscures OSI Layers 5 - 7 (the application signatures) from the router. If you want application layer classification then moving QoS to the Steelhead is the best option. The Steelhead can see all the application signatures prior to optimization and apply the most appropriate QoS level. If the WAN supports Classes of Service then the Steelhead can also intelligently mark DiffServ bits, so an application’s packets are treated accordingly across the whole network. This enables an application-aware end-to-end QoS  architecture. To learn how to configure the new QoS features in RiOS 6.5 refer to Chapter 3 of the RiOS 6.5 Riverbed Deployment Guide and Chapter 7 of the Steelhead Management Console User Guide.

 
With the acquisitions of Mazu and CACE Technologies Riverbed gained several unique visibility solutions…Cascade Profiler, Pilot, and Shark. The rapid integration of these solutions with Steelheads has delivered a formidable and cost-effective performance analysis toolset that tightly integrates with WAN optimization as a whole. Steelheads have long supported NetFlow export and tcpdump for packet captures. With Steelhead’s adoption of cascade-flow export, organizations can migrate from a basic utilization-focused view with Netflow to cascade-flow’s performance-centric view. This enables streamlined monitoring/troubleshooting for applications, sites, networks and users. The customers I’ve had deploy Cascade absolutely love the service dashboards, Active Directory user tracking integration, and true application-layer visibility. When they first migrate from the port and IP address visibility of NetFlow to the application visibility of Cascade they are amazed at what applications are really on their networks.

If they layer on Pilot and Shark they get high-speed packet capture, transaction visualizations, and packet analysis to quickly find the root cause of problems. Riverbed has a long tradition helping customers set new IT speed records, and we’ve just done it again with the addition of Cascade Profiler’s right-click integration with Pilot/Shark. Customers now can drill-down from reports in Cascade Profiler to the transaction and packet visualizations in Pilot all in the same workflow.  If they need to go even deeper they just right-click and open only the packets they desire in Wireshark where they can see the exact bit and bytes. My customers have been particularly impressed with Pilot's ability to efficiently find and analyze VoIP call problems. Finding and analyzing performance problems has never been easier.  To see videos of  Pilot in action go here.

At the end of day, if an organization can’t proactively solve network, application and user performance challenges then they won’t have great performance. When WAN optimization is deployed across an enterprise proper planning and execution to ensure the IT staff has the right visibility into the right data is worth the effort.  With Steelheads at remote sites integrated with Cascade at the datacenter customers now have enterprise-wide visibility to efficiently find and analyze performance challenges.

Don’t settle for good performance, upgrade to great performance today.

Distributed recentralization: Networks to eleven!

It's a sunny Friday morning here in Seattle. (No, really.) On these rare times when prodigious quantities of warmth and light stream through the large south and east windows of my house, it's easy to let the daily fray subside for a bit and reflect on larger trends. Lately, I've noticed some interesting connections between cloud computing and user-centric IT.

A colleague recently spotted a couple articles that piqued my curiosity. In The virtual desktop: Everything old is new again, CRN's Edward Corriea describes how virtualization's initial appearance on mainframes faded away like an old pair of jeans, only to come back in fashion later: first on commodity x86 hardware and then as one of the core components of cloud computing. Next up is desktop virtualization, or VDI. Edward cites VDI's intense I/O requirements as one of the main shortfalls of large-scale VDI deployments. So many virtual clients, each performing profligate I/O itself, create a "VM I/O blender" on the physical hardware: constant random I/O kills disk performance.

In InformationWeek's 2011 End-user Device Survey, Jonathan Feldman chronicles the ongoing consumerization of corporate IT. Provocatively, he wonders whether it makes sense to hang on to the traditional corporate desktop. Android tablets and VDI are both making gains, he writes; yet fat desktops trapped in three-year replacement cycles and tied to expensive PC leases remain prevalent. Not everything is so gloomy, though. SaaS subscriptions are way up and for some organizations speed now trumps features: he's seeing tradeoff of screen size for portability. Jonathan's data show that organizations are now readying for true VDI, too. He goes on to describe how to free up IT funds to support comprehensive mobile device management, including the burgeoning BYOD ("bring your own device") movement. Jonathan concludes with sage advice: "The end user device paradigm shift offers significant opportunities for business technology innovation, but you'll miss out if you're purely focusing on span of control and defensive IT."

Reading these articles reminded me about a presentation on virtualization security I delivered at Microsoft TechEd a few years ago. I began that talk, as I frequently do, with a short retrospective. The "operating system" running on that hulking PC you bought in the late 1980s didn't have a whole lot to worry about: how much damage can one user running one application really cause? Eventually the operating system had to mature: first to enforce application boundaries so that multitasking would work, then to enforce user boundaries so that multiple people could share a computer. When hardware became powerful enough, software technology shifted: a hypervisor along with a finely-tuned host OS enforced guest OS boundaries so that multiple environments could share a server. A simple visual progression of these trust boundaries might look like this:

At this point, you might be wondering: "What's this got to do with user-centric IT and, wait, doesn't Riverbed sell network stuff?" Let me link these seemingly disparate elements together.

Virtualization is, of course, one of the fundamental technologies that underlie cloud -- providers can crank resource utilization to 11.  But a funny thing happened along the way to the user-centric IT concert: while the cloud offers seemingly infinite compute and storage, people learned the bandwidth to get there isn't all unicorns and rainbows. That phone or tablet of yours is a full-fledged computer, roomy and always connected. It's likely to be your primary means of accessing (and secondary means of storing) work-related stuff. The trends Edward and Jon highlight -- more VDI, more BYOD, more SaaS, more mobility -- all require network capacities that are expensive to build out and bump into inconvenient laws of physics.

We're entering an era I call distributed recentralization. As I ponder the simultaneous emergence of cloud computing and the move toward IT consumerization, it occurs to me that each one contributes to the sudden and continual growth of the other. We humans are creating and consuming massive amounts of data every day, a lot of it with consumer-type devices. Much of that information gets sent to and redistributed from the cloud. All this activity puts enormous pressures on network links -- pressures that often can't be overcome just by buying a bigger pipe.

We're passionate about WANs at Riverbed. WANs allow people to create, access, store, and compute information wherever it's convenient to do so -- frequently at distance. Our expanding product line enables you to be as creative as you can be without worrying about network or storage constraints. Cloud and consumerization certainly don't imply that IT will become a commodity; indeed, the information an organization possess, and how it manipulates and shares that information, truly are competitive differentiators. Let us help you crank your differentiation to 11.

Optimization Is for the Clouds

While some enterprises are still unsure of how the cloud will benefit them, conference organizers certainly don't share that trepidation: my calendar is packed with events. I wish I could say that people have agreed on what the cloud is, but no -- not only is cloud computing keeping the events industry afloat, it provides a platform (get it?) for endless debate and gasbaggery.

Since I always enjoy being in the middle of the fray, I'll take my turn. Fundamentally, the cloud is one great big WAN. And where there's a WAN, there's...a...(here it comes)...way! To eliminate inherent performance problems! To provide users that lush, LAN-like experience! (Hm, is that an orchestra swelling in the background somewhere?)

The performance challenges posed by cloud computing are really very similar to those posed by other forms of computing from a distance. Fortunately, you can solve these in much the same way you solved general WAN performance problems you encountered during your data center consolidation project. I'm working on a paper some of the cool things you can with Cloud Steelhead and Amazon EC2. I'd like to float a few of my ideas here.

Optimizing project migration

Many organizations get started with cloud computing by duplicating an important (but not critical) application to the cloud for a period of testing time. If the testing is successful, the on-premise deployment is decommissioned and the cloud deployment becomes primary. Steelhead can help this project succeed in two ways:

• The appliance in your data center and a Cloud Steelhead in your AWS region can accelerate the initial transfer of applications, data, and even full server images using AWS VM Import

• During the testing phase and after migration, the Steelheads will continually optimize communications between users on your network and applications running on instances in the cloud, providing LAN-like performance

Bringing dispersed organizations together

Distributed organizations can dispense with centralized IT altogether and instead deploy everything in the cloud. In some cases, venture capital funding even requires this. The economic and technical benefits are clear: applications can be written to take full advantage of the cloud's capabilities and resources can be added or removed to match demand. Bandwidth usage in these scenarios can be quite high, though. This is an ideal opportunity to combine branch office Steelheads, mobile Steelheads, and Cloud Steelhead together to drive further cost reduction from your monthy telecommunications and cloud transfer charges.

Optimizing cross-region transfer

Cloud Steelheads can communicate with each other, too. Global enterprises using AWS often need to transfer data from one region to another. Because AWS relies on public Internet connections for data transfer between regions, Cloud Steelhead can accelerate these transfers and reduce your bandwidth costs, often by a significant amount. When you configure a Cloud Steelhead in each region, the auto-discovery agent will detect the Steelheads and ensure that cross-region traffic is optimized.

Boosting one cloud with another

You can take advantage of AWS's international peering agreements to accelerate traffic to other cloud providers that don't offer Steelhead as an option in their data centers or on virtual machines. As an example, assume you’re a business based in Australia and you wish to consume PaaS or SaaS style cloud services from a provider whose closest data centers are in Singapore. Even under the best of network conditions, latency between these locations can be unbearably high. It's likely, though, that AWS's Singapore region is topologically very close to your ultimate destination, perhaps with latencies as low as five milliseconds. You can install Steelhead appliances in your Australia office, deploy a few Cloud Steelhead instances in AWS Singapore, and route traffic to and from your ultimate destination via AWS. Users will experience performance almost like that of a LAN because the long-distance, high-latency links are carrying only optimized traffic.

What would you like to do with Cloud Steelhead?

If you're wondering whether Cloud Steelhead would benefit your particular project, drop me a note in the comments below and I'll reply. Cloud Steelhead is an ideal application for compute requirements on Amazon EC2 where users are separated from resources by long distances.

Video: 6 year old installs Riverbed Steelhead appliance

Riverbed has gained a reputation throughout the years for having a groundbreaking technology that not only performs great, but is also simple to deploy.  I decided to put Riverbed's "it is simple" reputation to the test and asked my 6 year old daughter to perform an installation and configuration of Riverbed's flagship Steelhead appliance.  6 year-old Jasmine was not only successful at installing and configuring the appliance, she also tested it afterwards!  

This is all caught on video. Enjoy! 

 

 

Configuring the Steelhead appliance for RDP acceleration

My blog last week featured a video demonstrating how Steelhead appliance can accelerate RDP 7 environments.  The blog triggered a number of inquiries about how to configure the Steelhead to achieve these type of results.

 Below is a list of the steps you need to take:

 

1. Turn off RDP compression and encryption
2.  Remove RDP (TCP port 3389) from the default "interactive' port labels list in the Steelhead appliance management console
3.  Create an in-path rule for destination port 3389, with "neural framing mode" set to "never" and normal optimization

Note: If you are not familiar how to do this, please reference the "View WAN Reference Architecture" document on VMware's website

Performing these 3 simple configuration steps changes RDP from being passed-through unoptimized to being intercepted and optimized by Steelhead appliances.  Happy optimizing!

 

Satellite 2011 Opens in Washington DC

 

Today's guest blogger is Jin Woo, Manager for Public Relations here at Riverbed.

This week Riverbed will be in booth #949 at the Satellite 2011 Conference, taking place at the Walter E Washington Convention Center in Washington DC. This will be a great opportunity for everyone to learn about the benefits Riverbed users can expect by improving satellite-based WAN communications.

Back in November 2010 Riverbed acquired Global Protocols, the creators of Skipware, the leading commercial implementation of the Space Communications Protocol Standards (SCPS). The addition of Global Protocols's SkipWare to Riverbed WAN optimization bolsters Riverbed's leadership position in delivering optimization solutions for satellite networks. Skipware customers are able to overcome the performance challenges associated with extremely high latency that satellite-based networks introduce.

Unlike satellite-specific optimization products, which typically only improve the behavior of TCP, Riverbed WAN optimization solutions tackle all three factors affecting satellite-based WANs:

1. Limited bandwidth
2. TCP behavior, and
3. Application-protocol inefficiencies. 

Riverbed satellite-based WAN optimization solutions are utilized by organizations where landlines are not available, too expensive, or unable to deliver the required bandwidth. Often this includes oil platforms, cruise ships, and military field units.

In February, Riverbed also announced enhancements to the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), the software that powers Riverbed WAN optimization solutions, to deliver LTTS, TCP Westwood, and SCPS integration into Steelhead appliances. The satellite optimizations deliver adaptive TCP optimization to better utilize bandwidth over lossy links with high latency, and to deliver resiliency in the case of packet loss. This release also offers continued support for SCPS interoperability.

To learn more about how Riverbed helps customer accelerate satellite environments, click 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?

Delivering Local-like performance for RemoteFX over the WAN

Today, Microsoft announced the availability of SP1 for Windows 2008 R2.  One of the key capabilities included in SP1 is RemoteFX, which is Microsoft's next-generation desktop virtualization platform. 

RemoteFX leverages the power of virtualized graphics resources and advanced codecs to recreate the fidelity of hardware-assisted graphics acceleration, including support for 3D content and Windows Aero, on a remote user’s device. This allows for a local-like, remote user experience over a variety of possible host, client and network configurations. Dynamic Memory is a new memory management feature of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. 

RemoteFX is optimized to deliver performance to users located on a local area network.  Riverbed extends the local performance experience to RemoteFX users located over a WAN.  Riverbed's Steelhead family of WAN optimization products allow the RemoteFX protocol to more fully utilize the available WAN bandwidth, and significantly increase the number of frames per second of a RemoteFX session, resulting in a smoother, higher fidelity user experience.

Riverbed optimizes Microsoft RemoteFX traffic over the WAN:

• For office-type users over the WAN
• Reduce TCP bandwidth consumption over the WAN, increasing productivity
• Supports remotely rendered WMP files, and streamed WMP, Microsoft Silverlight, and Flash video 

Here is a demo of Riverbed accelerating RemoteFX

 

You can find out more about the RemoteFX SP1 announcement today by reading Microsoft's blog. You can also download a trial of of RemoteFX SP1 here.

 

 

Riverbed Connect Podcast - RiOS 6.5 and Cascade 9.0

Bob Gilbert and Vikram Ramesh discuss the 6.5 update to RiOS, the software that powers Riverbed's WAN optimization products.  Also discussed is Cascade 9.0, which is a major update to Riverbed's solution for providing visibility into network and application performance.

 

 

Riverbed Think Fast Demo - Cascade 9.0

Cascade 9.0 Demo

 

Riverbed Think Fast Demo - Advanced QoS Engine

RiOS 6.5 and the Advanced QoS Engine

 

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.

 

Performance Hall of Fame Winner

Congratulations to Cristiano Luvizon of Vonpar (site is in Portuguese) in Brazil for winning the November Performance Hall of Fame.  You can find his entry, More than 650GB removed in a month, band cap. increase 5.17X!! right here.  Cristiano is the Security Officer, and is the analyst responsible for data links.  Vonpar oversees two independent organizations in the food and beverage industry in Brazil, Vonpar Bebidas (the 4^th largest Coca-Cola manufacturer in Brazil) and Vonpar Alimentos.

Vonpar acquired and installed their 12 Steelhead Appliances (two 1050Hs, a 550H, a 250H, and eight 250Ms) and 30 Steelhead Mobile licenses in June, 2009, and they are distributed around two southern Brazilian states, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul.  Primarily they use them for HTTP, CIFS and Lotus Notes, and as indicated in the graph, he has reduced bandwidth consumed by these applications by between 80 and 94%, and removed more than 650GB of WAN traffic in a month. 

Cristiano loves to tell the story of the day that the Steelhead Appliances were installed at their second set of remote sites.  They pre-configured the appliances and shipped them out intending to send technicians to complete the installations once they had complete the installations in the main data center.  But users at the first sites to receive the appliances called their colleagues at the second sites and told them how amazing the Steelheads are.  So their colleagues, who are financial, commercial, and logistical analysts  without very much technical knowledge, went ahead and installed the Steelhead appliances all by themselves.  No technicians required.  And they were thrilled by the performance improvement.

We love this story too, because it once again shows how easy our appliances are to install, and how much difference they can make for the people and companies who use them. 

Letting Others Do Our Job

I've worked for a bunch of different companies in my career in a variety of roles.  I have never worked for an organization where customers consistently demonstrate as much unbridled enthusiasm for a vendor's products as they do here at Riverbed.  No, not everything is 100% positive, and when there are negatives we work very hard to fix them.  Overall, though, customer response is remarkably positive, and when someone makes negative comments, customers often step in to respond to them before anyone from Riverbed has the chance to. And while we take the positive comments seriously, we take the negative ones far more seriously.

In a separate but related note, a big part of my job as Marketing Evangelist for Riverbed is to search various social media outlets for mentions, positive and negative, of Riverbed.  (As a tangential aside, when both the name of your company and the name of your flagship product are commonly-used nouns, it makes searching for mentions in social media extra-challenging.)

The point of this slightly rambling blog is that during our searches for mentions of Riverbed, we often find some terrific things being written about us in forums that we have absolutely nothing to do with.  (We also find terrific things in forums that we DO have things to do with...)  Here is a fine example:

In a forum called Spiceworks, you can find a discussion which includes the following totally unsolicited excerpt from a topic, written by a user who calls himself rhipkin:

We have just finished our Riverbed implementation. We are seeing improvements of up to 90% in some cases. We are confident of now removing servers from sites and bringing all data back to the head office to the data center.

Riverbed is solid and highly recommended.

Clearly this user has implemented Riverbed Steelhead appliances for WAN Optimization and may have also implemented the RSP (Riverbed Services Platform) to virtualize applications and servers that had been running at his branch offices, and has seen great success doing so.  And he's happy to share the information with the world.

I like to think that these people are on to something...

What impact can Riverbed have on a 100Mbps WAN circuit?

A customer recently shared this screenshot that clearly shows a nearly saturated 100Mbps link almost instantaneously going to less than 20% utilized immediately after installin a couple of Steelhead 6050 appliances.

 

Autodesk University 2010

We're coming to you today from The Mandalay Bay Hotel Convention Center in Las Vegas, where we are attending Autodesk University 2010.  More precisely, we're working the booth on the Expo floor.  You can find us in booth #1622.  The expo started last night at 6pm when the doors were opened and the place filled with conference attendees.  This is an extremely well-attended conference with attendees from all over the world.

Riverbed WAN Optimization had been mentioned by name in a couple of the breakout sessions earlier in the day yesterday, and so we had a bunch of people stop by the booth who were not otherwise familiar with WAN Optimization.  Many of the questions we heard had to do with Autodesk's Revit Building Information Management software, and whether or not Steelhead appliances could speed up Revit activity across the WAN.  The answer is that we most definitely can.  We have documented results that show a 44x improvement in application performance and a 4-5x reduction in bandwidth.

The result is that you don't need local Revit servers in your branch offices to enable collaboration if you have Riverbed optimizing your WAN.  If you already do have branch office Revit servers, then you'll see a dramatic improvement in sync performance between the data center and the branch office's server.

Our friends and partners at Collaboration Systems Group, in booth #1623 (right behind our booth) are demonstrating the combination of Riverbed Steelhead appliances and Revit in their booth, and drawing quite a crowd.

If you're in town for Autodesk University, please make a point of stopping by the booth and saying hi.  We'd love to see you.

Make those VM backups even FASTER!

Riverbed recently announced that Pancetera has joined the Riverbed Technology Alliance.  

Our friends over at the Pancetera Blog have blogged a couple of times (one and two) about how combining their Pancetera Unite product with Riverbed Steelhead Appliances can deliver even better performance for Virtual Machine and traditional backups across the WAN than either product can alone.  

My favorite quote from their blog is as follows:

A dedicated OC-3 line of 155 Mbps with Pancetera and Riverbed Steelhead will perform better than an OC-12 of 622 Mbps line at a quarter of the cost. Savings of $500,000+ per year provide a near instant ROI.