One of our partners CBO has taken Riverbed's Steelhead appliance to another level. CBO's EDGE product is the ultimate ruggedized platform that delivers enterprise connectivity anyplace, anywhere, anytime with LAN like speed and provides a platform for consolidation of infrastructure at the edge.
You can learn more here
We
at Riverbed are very excited to announce our new Virtual Steelhead product
today.
Virtual Steelhead allows our customers to get all the features and benefits of WAN Optimization in places and situations where they could not get it before. We’ve had inquiries from military organizations who want to throw Steelhead appliances out of airplanes (they could always do that) and have them work in combat or other high-pressure situations once they hit the ground (that part was always a little trickier). Now you’ll be able to take that Virtual Steelhead and run it inside a ruggedized server as just another virtual machine.
We’ve had customers who want the advantages of WAN optimization in an environment where they don’t have the physical space to fit a Steelhead appliance, such as in a local TV news van, at a construction site, or in an Emergency Medical Services vehicle. Virtual Steelhead will give them all the functionality of a physical Steelhead appliance without consuming any valuable hardware space or taking up any additional network or power ports.
Many of our customers have data centers that are almost entirely virtualized, and they are reluctant to deploy Steelhead appliances in those data centers. The virtual machines in those data centers are already being managed by tools like vSphere, RightScale, PlateSpin, etc. Virtual Steelhead fits right in; it can be managed by those same tools. The end result with Virtual Steelhead is that WAN optimization becomes a viable option for virtually deployed data centers, too.
We also hear from MSPs and their customers quite often. Many MSPs would like to be able offer WAN Optimization as a premium service to their customers. The problem (before Virtual Steelhead) is that doing so requires deploying individual Steelhead appliances for each customer, and having sufficient network segregation between multiple customers. With Virtual Steelhead, the MSP need only deploy a VM for any customer who purchases WAN optimization, enabling the MSP to spin up multiple customers faster and more efficiently.
Virtual Steelhead is a very exciting addition to the Riverbed product set that will permit users to have access to WAN optimization who have never had it before. Plus you can throw it out of an airplane… and it’ll still work when it hits the ground!
Much has been said about the potential benefits of Cloud-based computing, including significant cost reductions and greater IT efficiency. But as we migrate our IT applications and infrastructures into the "Cloud," we also incur greater dependence on the WAN to access our data.
With the various WAN optimization products from different vendors available on the market, how is one to determine the offering that is best suited for a Cloudy environment? Here are five important clues--attributes to look for--that will help determine whether a given WAN optimization offering is suited for Cloud environments:
1) Software client that peers with cloud-based WAN optimization devices - One of the neat things about Cloud environments is that with a web browser, you can access your SaaS applications from just about any location. It doesn't matter if you're at work, at home, in the airport lounge, hotel room--your data is available to you regardless of where you are. To provide fast LAN-like access to your Cloud data, Riverbed offers the Steelhead Mobile product that goes anywhere you take your computer. But a particularly important attribute of Steelhead Mobile is that it is completely integrated with Steelhead appliances, thus avoiding the need for the Cloud provider to deploy and support two parallel redundant infrastructures--one for mobile software clients and another separate infrastructure to support client-side WAN optimization appliances.
2) Layer-7 optimization mechanisms designed for Cloud-hosted apps - Riverbed offers application-specific optimizations for applications that are commonly used in Cloud environments, including layer-7 optimizations for Sharepoint, Exchange, Oracle E-Business Suite (both JInitiator and JRE clients), and HTTP-based applications. Riverbed's application-specific optimizations go far beyond just simple compression--they also address latency, protocol chattiness, and data encoding issues that cannot be addressed through generic compression techniques.
3) Universal data store for scalability - Cloud-based WAN optimization services must support even greater scale than privately-deployed WAN optimization. This is not only because public Cloud infrastructures support multiple enterprises, but also because a Cloud-hosted application requires that all employees of an enterprise--even those located in the corporate HQ offices--need to use the WAN to access their Cloud-hosted data. Previously the WAN was only used by those employees that were not physically co-located with the main data center. Riverbed is the only top-tier WAN optimization vendor to use a unified data store. The importance of a universal data store for scalability is explained in one of my earlier blogs.
4) Optimize secure traffic - Security is a key concern in public Cloud environments. The abity to optimize secure protocols such as encrypted MAPI, encrypted Lotus Notes, SMB-signed CIFS, and SSL traffic are especially important for deploying WAN optimization into the Cloud. Riverbed is the only WAN optimization vendor that is able to optimize all of these secure traffic types; all other vendors require that you disable security for some or all of these protocols.
5) Close relationship with Cloud providers - What good would it be if you deployed WAN optimization products from vendor A, only to find out that most Cloud providers have standardized on vendor B? Because WAN optimization products all use proprietary algorithms and technologies, there would be no interoperability, and you would be forced to switch products.
There is a good reason why Cloud providers are gravitating to Riverbed. Riverbed is the leader in WAN optimization. Riverbed also has very strong relationships with a large number of different Cloud service providers, who know that only Riverbed's offering is truly capable of meeting scaling requirements for their service provider environments. Riverbed is already being used by a number of enterprises to optimize production Cloud traffic for thousands of employees, including Exchange and Sharepoint traffic in Microsoft Online BPOS-D cloud services. And virtual Steelheads have also been demonstrated in Amazon Web Services' Cloud infrastructure. Cloud providers know without a doubt that the Steelhead solution will perform reliably at the scale required to deliver commercial Cloud services; the same cannot necessarily be said about offerings from other vendors.
BT recently posted a Virtual Expert video on AAI WOS (WAN Optimisation Service). This is a great intro video that describes the BT offering that is based exclusively on Riverbed. Another interesting note is that BT is not only a Riverbed partner, but also a customer as they use Riverbed internally for their WAN optimization needs.
You can access the video here http://www.globalservices.bt.com/gbl/en/page/aai_wan_virtual_expert
With the McAfee-Riverbed partnership announcement earlier this year, organizations looking to both secure and accelerate their branch office infrastructure now have a powerful option that combines McAfee's award-winning branch office security platform with Riverbed's market-leading WAN optimization.
The partnership recently took another step forward as McAfee announced some pretty significant partner incentives that award McAfee partners who sell Riverbed and partners addressing customers who have already installed the Riverbed Steelhead appliance inside their organization.
McAfee Firewall Enterprise is integrated into the Riverbed Steelhead appliance by way of the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), a virtualized environment that runs on the appliance. This integrated solution combines a single box platform containing Riverbed's WAN optimization and McAfee's multi-layer firewall.
Think best of breed branch office security combined with best of breed WAN optimization. What's not to like?
On my commute home today from San Francisco to the suburbs, I ran into this IT guy on his way to do an install. Notice the big smile on his face.
A big day today in technology news. On the consumer side, Apple will be unveiling their new gadgets during their worldwide developer conference in San Francisco.
Not to be outdone, Riverbed is generating excitement today in the IT landscape with the launch of the RiOS 6.1, a hefty software update to Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead appliance.
RiOS 6.1 has new optimizations for Microsoft applications like Exchange 2010 and Microsoft Online Services and storage optimizations for SRDF and FCIP. There is HA support for RSP. With this release Riverbed delivers superior acceleration across a wide variety of infrastructure, thereby providing maximum performance for any cloud, architecture or application.Riverbed is announcing a lot of Industry Firsts with this software update.
With RiOS 6.1, Riverbed is the first WAN Optimization vendor to offer optimizations for the following:Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) High Availability
Improved support for RSP in HA environments. RSP has been deployed successfully as a branch office box (BOB) solution across a wide array of customers. HA support for RSP allows customers the flexibility to consolidate branch office services without impacting availability.
Hello Fans of the Riverbed Blog,
I’m Evan Marcus, and I have just recently joined the Riverbed Marketing Evangelism team. (Yes, we all know that makes me Evan the Evangelist. Just laugh now and get it out of your system.) I’ll be based out of my home office in northern New Jersey. (Just laugh now and get that out of your system, too.)
What that means is that I’ll be working with Bob Gilbert, Riverbed’s Director of Marketing for Customers, Community, and Evangelism to sing the Gospel of Riverbed. What that really means is that I’ll be blogging (this is the first of many), vlogging, and speaking at a variety of Riverbed events about what we do, and why everybody needs it so much. I’ll also be taking a lead role in Riverbed’s Social Media presence (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube), and the Riverbed Community web site, and I will be a very visible face at Riverbed User Group meetings, especially those in the Eastern US.
I come from a fairly varied technical and communications-oriented
background. Most recently I’ve been a
Sales Engineer with some extra writing or speaking duties at a variety of small
technology companies including nlyte Software and Archivas Software. Before all that, I spent 8 years at Veritas
Software, where, among other things, I co-wrote and edited four books,
including Blueprints for High Availability and The Resilient Enterprise (a book
about Disaster Recovery). With the title
“Availability Maven,” I became a speaker at a variety of Veritas conferences
and events, and even organized and MC’d their internal engineering conference two
straight years. I’ve also been a semi-regular tutorial instructor at the LISA and
USENIX conferences for the last 10 years or so.
I have had a lot of exposure to a variety of different technologies, including Unix systems, Windows systems, storage, data center design and capacity planning, networking, discovery, security, and more. I’ve also developed some interactive web sites in my spare time.
Riverbed is a very exciting place to be, and I am thrilled to be here. I am consistently impressed by the technology here. The words I keep hearing are Speed, Scalability, and Simplicity. It’s obvious to me that that’s more than just words to the people here at Riverbed; that shows in everything I’ve seen since I arrived.
I look forward to meeting you at Riverbed events. If you see me at a Riverbed event, please don’t hesitate to introduce yourself to me.
Thank you,
Evan Marcus
evan.marcus@riverbed.com
Question: What is a key competitive advantage shared by both the Apple iPhone and Riverbed Steelhead?
Answer: They both support more applications than competitive products
Riverbed offers more application-specific optimization capabilities than any other WAN optimization product. Application-specific optimization capabilities are important for two reasons: 1) some applications exhibit chatty protocol behavior that results in poor performance in a high-latency environment, and 2) some applications perform encoding, encryption, and/or compression of their data, and this process obscures any data redundancy that may exist in the application data. Note that these are layer-7 attributes of these applications, which cannot be addressed by applying compression or any other mechanism at lower layers in the OSI protocol stack including layer-3 and layer-4.
For those applications in the former category that exhibit chatty protocol behavior, the WAN optimization solution must be able to intelligently and predictively pre-fetch data in order to remove round-trip interactions across the WAN. For those applications that encode their data somehow, the WAN optimization solution must be able to undo any such encoding, compression, or encryption prior to applying its compression and data reduction algorithms. Otherwise, those algorithms will be ineffective or less effective when performed on the encoded data format. Note that some applications exhibit both types of these behaviors.
The Riverbed Steelhead solution is able to address both types of issues for a wide range of applications and protocols, including CIFS, NFS, MAPI2003, MAPI2007, encrypted MAPI, Lotus Notes, HTTP, SSL, Oracle Forms (both Sun JRE and Oracle JInitiator), MS-SQL, and Citrix ICA. And we're always working on adding more applications--in the future you'll see still more application-specific optimization capabilities added to this list.
So why has Riverbed been able to sustain and extend its lead in application-specific capabilities over competitive vendors? One reason is because Riverbed is able to focus more engineering resources on WAN optimization compared to any other vendor. While Cisco is certainly a larger company, Riverbed has greater WAN optimization market share than Cisco. Furthermore, WAAS revenues from WAN optimization represent only about 0.5% of Cisco's overall business revenues; Riverbed has more resources in terms of development and support engineers who are focused just on WAN optimization.
On the other hand at least one of the smaller WAN optimization vendors claim that "network-level" or "network-centric" WAN optimization is faster or somehow better than "application-centric" optimization--an apparent reference to Riverbed's vastly superior application-aware optimization capabilities. That is essentially saying that their product can deliver faster performance for applications by being ignorant of the protocol-specific behavior of those applications. This fallacious statement is meant to distract from the observation that the vendor lacks the engineering development resources needed to keep up with Riverbed's more application-aware Steelhead offering. Another problem with this line of reasoning is that compression products dating back to the early 1990's have always been able to perform "network-level" layer-3 optimization. In fact, application-specific optimization capabilities is one of the key distinctions between the older-era compression devices (e.g., PacketShaper) and the new-generation of WAN optimization solutions available from Riverbed.
Today InfoWorld released their latest review of Riverbed Steelhead WAN Optimization, after extensive benchmarking and evaluation of the features, performance, and manageability. I'll let you read the conclusions for yourself:
"Each time I get my hands on a new Steelhead appliance, I come away impressed by how Riverbed can still find ways to improve it. The new features in RiOS 6 add even more capacity, flexibility, and scalability to an already superb product, and the new chassis fits in well with midsize office needs, yet doesn't scrimp on any particular feature. All in all, Riverbed continues to define what a WAN optimization and acceleration appliance should be. No IT shop evaluating a WAN acceleration and optimization solution should pass up a chance to put a Steelhead appliance through its paces." - Keith Schultz, InfoWorld
And here's some history on Riverbed's performance in the InfoWorld Technology of the Year awards for Best WAN Accelerator, where we've won first place five years in a row from 2005 to 2009....
Short of a world-ending Eschaton epidemic of earthquakes, volcanoes, and floods like that coming in 2012, most data protection is simple: take everything and copy it somewhere far enough away so that you’ll have it when you need it — in an emergency. The challenge is how to do this in the most efficient and reliable way.
Un-optimized wide area network-based approaches to data backup are naturally limited by the performance of the WAN (wide area network). Bandwidth limitations and network latency can make backup take much longer than desired. For large remote offices with significant datastores, this can make WAN-based backup impossible without significant costly WAN bandwidth upgrades. Deploying WAN optimization solutions can help you protect more, recover faster, reduce risk and save money.
Below we provide 10 reasons to deploy WAN optimization for disaster recovery
10. Eliminate Backup in Branches. By effectively leveraging the wide area network for backup or replication of data in branch offices, you can save on the hardware, software, and administrative costs of local backup, tape duplication, and manual offsite transportation of tapes.
9. Reduce Costs. Data streamlining deduplicates WAN traffic, reducing disaster recovery bandwidth requirements by up to 95%, cutting your network costs significantly. Also the elimination of branch backup brings massive savings for every office.
8. Reduce Administrative Overhead. Using the WAN as your data transport mechanism instead of tapes provides automated, reliable DR operations. No more time wasted in the shuffling of tapes by IT staff (or non-IT staff for that matter!).
7. Reduce Security Risk. Eliminating tape transport and encrypting WAN traffic, coupled with centralized storage and role-based administration, makes passing industry and government regulatory audits much, much easier. No headline news about loss of your confidential information.
6. Protect More Data. By accelerating replication and backup up to 45x faster across the WAN, you can now cover not just mission-critical data, but ALL the data across your enterprise, while easily making your backup windows. This includes mobile workers laptops too.
5. Protect More Often. Faster DR on the WAN also translates into great improvements in your recovery point objective (RPO), reducing the amount of time and data that could have been lost since your last backup.
4. Recover Faster. Restore data across the WAN instantly instead of waiting for backup tapes to be found and delivered for an improved recovery time objective (RTO). Or better yet, have all your data staged and ready to go in your remote DR site. Even improve business continuity by having employees working productively from remote or temporary locations after a site disaster.
3. Centralize Storage or Move it to the Cloud. Whether you choose public or private cloud storage, enjoy the resilience and economies of scale for reduced costs and fast access from anywhere.
2. Make the Most of Your Storage Investment. Get more from your current storage hardware and software, and have the confidence of knowing that the solutions have been qualified and certified for use with Riverbed.
1. Have Your DR operations Play Nice with Your Business Apps. Use powerful quality of service (QoS) capabilities to match your priorities, whether you want replication to take precedence over other WAN traffic or vice versa, never slow things down.
To find out more about the benefits of how Riverbed WAN optimization solutions benefits DR, please visit http://www.riverbed.com/results/solutions/centralize_replicate/.
This past week's Interop conference was an encouraging experience -- the Riverbed booth drew strong interest from attendees wanting to view our presentation and the Steelhead Mobile demonstration. But there was another observation this week that was even more noticeable than in past Interop conferences from previous years--a startling number of Cisco WAAS customers were actively visiting the Riverbed booth to investigate the Steelhead solution. I personally talked to more than a few WAAS users myself, and my colleagues who were also at the booth similarly reported being approached by inordinate numbers of Cisco WAAS users, including some individuals representing very large enterprises.
A common question they brought up was about how Riverbed addresses patches and CIFS protocol changes implemented by Microsoft. The apparent context of this question was in reference to a recent Windows operating system patch -- KB980232 -- distributed by Microsoft several weeks ago to address some security vulnerabilities in the Windows CIFS client. This patch causes subtle changes in the protocol behavior by Windows CIFS clients, resulting in problems during CIFS file save operations that are being optimized by Cisco's WAAS product. The problem has also been reported by Network World. But for these Cisco WAAS users, this recent difficulty was only the latest in a series of historic WAAS stability problems that they have faced. For this particular problem, Cisco has offered a fix, although that fix requires an upgrade to the newest and unproven WAAS 4.1.5f image (but no fix exists yet for users of WAAS 4.0).
The WAAS users I spoke with were intrigued to hear that Riverbed Steelhead customers have not been impacted by Microsoft's Windows patch. The reasons for the stability of Steelhead deployments go far beyond Riverbed's strong business and technical relationship with Microsoft (indeed, Cisco claims a similar relationship with Microsoft). Rather, the key difference in Riverbed's situation is the Steelhead's transparent TCP proxy architecture compared to the WAAS product's layer-7 caching/proxy approach used to optimize CIFS traffic. In other words, WAAS is a CIFS proxy, while Riverbed is not (Steelheads are a TCP proxy, but not a layer-7 proxy).
As a CIFS proxy, WAAS is responsible for acting as a proxy CIFS server when optimizing CIFS traffic from Windows workstations. In such a role, WAAS must fully and adequately respond to each and every CIFS message from Windows clients receiving optimization services from WAAS. If a Windows client initiates a message that WAAS doesn't expect or understand (such as due to the Microsoft patch), then its optimized CIFS session can potentially be impacted. In other words, in order to properly deliver WAN optimization services for CIFS traffic, WAAS must essentially be as statefully aware of the layer-7 CIFS session as the original Microsoft CIFS client and server. This stringent requirement to properly mimic the behavior of a CIFS server leaves WAAS vulnerable to behavioral changes in Windows clients that may occur as a result of Microsoft patches, such as KB980232.
In contrast, Riverbed Steelheads are not CIFS proxies, and they do not need to be as statefully aware of the CIFS session as a CIFS proxy would. This is an important distinction that allows Riverbed to focus on optimizing only those messages and operations that exhibit chatty protocol behavior. If the CIFS client exhibits unexpected behavior that the Steelhead does not understand or anticipate, the Steelhead can simply ignore those messages because it is not a CIFS proxy. Rather, since the Steelhead is transparent to the CIFS session, it can let the CIFS client interact directly with the original Windows server in the data center for those unrecognized CIFS messages. In this situation the Steelhead continues to offer data deduplication services in order to address bandwidth constraints in the WAN, but the Riverbed solution is not compelled to take any action on the unrecognized message or unexpected behavior that might jeopardize the stability of the ongoing CIFS session.
The fact that the Steelhead is not a layer-7 proxy for CIFS and other applications is one of the key reasons why Riverbed has consistently been able to scale Steelhead deployments for the largest and most complex network environments in the world. While Riverbed products are not perfect, and they do have their share of bugs and other issues, nevertheless the overall track record and stability of the Riverbed solution when deployed in such demanding enterprise environments has been very remarkable.
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