blogs.riverbed.com

La Porte Regional Health Systems deploys Riverbed to optimize medical imaging

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

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

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

Is Cisco still trying to eat their own dogfood? I thought they had given up...

Cisco first began selling WAN optimization in 2004.  Over the 5+ years that they have been aggressively promoting and selling the WAFS/WAAS product to their loyal customers, Cisco has been unwilling or unable to use WAAS themselves, in their own network.

The discrepancy between Cisco's words and actions must have been uncomfortable, because in 2008 Cisco finally made formal plans to deploy WAAS in their own network infrastructure.  These plans were documented in a WAAS progress report posted on Cisco's website in 2008.  An excerpt from page 6 of this document states the following:

Cisco has approximately 300 global offices that have less than 45 Mbps bandwidth.  Cisco partner IBM will deploy Cisco WAAS in these offices during the remainder of fiscal year 2008 and part of fiscal year 2009.

2008 and 2009 passed, and there was still no sign of an operational WAAS deployment in Cisco's own network.  I wrote my first dogfood blog in June 2009, wondering how they could sell WAAS without using it themselves.  Larry Chaffin similarly asked in his Network World blog ("Could the Rumors be true about Cisco?  They don't use WAAS in their own network?").  No response from Cisco, except for a few muddled references to "pilot testing" in some of their branch office sites.  Cisco even refused to comment on the progress of their WAAS deployment when confronted at their Cisco Live! conference.  The internal WAAS deployment effort apparently was not going according to plan.

At this point, I thought Cisco had given up on their WAAS deployment, just as many of Cisco's former WAAS customers have.  But unlike former WAAS customers, Cisco's IT department is probably not allowed to turn to Riverbed.  Then I saw a new blog, dated 25 January 2010, on Cisco's website:

http://blogs.cisco.com/ciscoit/comments/cisco_internal_waas_implementation/

The internal Cisco WAAS implementation continues to  expand broadly . So far IT has deployed WAAS to 200 Cisco remote offices worldwide.  When fully deployed over the next six months, we will have implemented WAAS in approximately 300 Cisco offices and eight data centers worldwide.

Here we go again.  Years after Cisco's previous aborted attempts to deploy WAAS, it seems Cisco is going to make another concerted effort to deploy it.  But Cisco's blog also raises even more unanswered questions, such as:

1)  The blog states that 200 WAAS devices have been deployed in Cisco's branch offices, but none seem to be deployed in Cisco's data centers.  What good is WAAS if they aren't optimizing network traffic to the data centers, where the majority of their application servers are located?  (and of course, the data centers are where the WAAS per-peer data store experiences severe scaling problems...) Are these "deployed" WAAS devices doing little other than optimizing a small amount of regional traffic?

2)  If Cisco's branch offices have less than 45Mbps of WAN bandwidth as documented in Cisco's 2008 WAAS progress report, then why are they primarily deploying the WAE-674 to these offices?  The WAE-674 is rated by Cisco for 90Mbps of WAN bandwidth, so why isn't Cisco using more of the smaller and more cost-effective WAVE models?  Does Cisco lack confidence in the performance specs published in their own WAAS data sheets?  Is Cisco internally aware of a WAAS performance or scaling issue that isn't reflected in their product documentation?

3)  Cisco's blog boasts about their hopes of saving $850,000 over 3 years from their 300-site WAAS deployment, as a result of consolidating servers and storage.  $850K over 3 years???  That's hardly impressive when you consider how Riverbed customer Lantmannen expects to save $60 million over five years after deploying the Steelhead solution to 300 sites.  Furthermore, note that a single WAE-674 appliance with the WoW virtual blade enabled costs $28,500 at list price.  300 of these deployed to Cisco's branch offices amount to $8.55 million.  Even at a 50% discount, Cisco's branch deployment would amount to spending $4.275 million dollars in order to save $850,000 over three years.  After adding a few additional million dollars to the bill for the data center WAAS devices, you end up with a hugely negative ROI.

Clearly, Cisco is not attempting to deploy WAAS for the ROI, which is hugely negative (even after Cisco's 85% discount for internal transfer pricing), but to convince their concerned customers that they can eat their own dogfood.  We wish Cisco luck on their renewed WAAS deployment efforts; perhaps they will get farther than their previous attempts. But of course, if this upcoming deployment effort doesn't work either, they can always write another new blog about planning to deploy WAAS in 2012...

Will Cisco ever catch up to Riverbed?

It’s no secret that WAAS lacks many features and capabilities offered by the market-leading Riverbed product.  But Cisco continuously justifies the purchase of their less-capable WAAS product by promising to customers that the next software release will resolve all of WAAS's problems and bugs, and finally be the "Riverbed killer."  And this reasoning sometimes works; many customers have suffered with WAAS--often for years--because of the expectation that "Cisco will catch up to Riverbed.” But now times are changing--many are starting to wonder if Cisco can ever execute on these promises.

 

Cisco's promises to deliver a "Riverbed killer" now date back some five years; WAAS is not a new product.  Rather, WAAS has a history that dates back to March of 2000, almost ten years ago when it was originally created as a file caching device called ActaStor.  That product was purchased by Cisco in 2004, and eventually re-named WAAS.  Through the five-year timeframe that Cisco has owned and developed WAAS, the product has been subjected to a rushed and chaotic development environment.  There was intense pressure on Cisco’s developers to quickly introduce the new features needed to “catch up to Riverbed,” and this naturally spawned numerous bugs and other software problems that have plagued WAAS, and caused a number of serious difficulties for Cisco’s early WAAS customers.

 

As software professionals know, an emphasis on quick feature releases and short-term fixes eventually undercuts itself as the overall product becomes hard to understand, modify, and support. Today’s WAAS product appears to be afflicted with extremely complex underlying software, primarily resulting from WAAS’s rushed development environment.   Due to its complexity, in recent years a pattern developed—every time Cisco released new WAAS features and capabilities, there would be a deluge of newly created bugs in that software release.  This was the case with a number of WAAS 4.0 releases, as well as the more recent WAAS 4.1.1 and 4.1.3 releases.  Even Cisco’s own product documentation reveals that WAAS 4.1.3 was delivered to customers with more known bugs than any previous version of WAAS software.

 

Bug problems in Cisco WAAS have become such an issue that the most recent WAAS software release—version 4.1.5—introduces no major new capabilities beyond a number of minor features that are essentially bug fixes.  It seems that WAAS release 4.1.5 is purely devoted to fixing existing problems found in the earlier WAAS software releases.  It has now been nearly a year since Cisco last released a major new feature for WAAS--SSL optimization--and that feature was delivered several months late.  While Riverbed was adding a raft of new features and capabilities in latest RiOS 5.5 and 6.0 software releases, Cisco has had to effectively suspend new WAAS feature development for the past year to focus on bug fixes. 

 

If historic patterns from the past five years of WAAS product development continue, WAAS customers can expect two things from Cisco’s future WAAS development efforts:  1) a deluge of bugs with any new WAAS software release containing major new features, and 2) long waiting periods to resolve those bugs before the new software features can be used in a production environment.

No one can tell the future; perhaps Cisco’s claims of catching up to Riverbed may still come true.  However, given the complexities that seem to exist deeply within the WAAS product, I believe that outcome is unlikely.  While individual bugs can be fixed, the underlying conditions that cause bugs in the WAAS product are much more difficult to address.  These are fundamental, long-term problems that have evolved over years, which possibly can only be fixed by starting over from scratch, through a compete re-write of the WAAS software.  Not only is there a wide gap in existing product capabilities, but WAAS’s underlying software is now so complex that adding new features and capabilities takes significantly more time, effort and development resources.  As a result, many observers have come to the conclusion that the most likely future scenario is that Cisco’s WAAS will continue to fall further behind Riverbed in product capabilities.

WAN optimization, Chinese Food, and Virtualized WOCs

 
 
Selecting a WAN optimization vendor is a lot like choosing a Chinese restaurant to eat at.  We all have certain expectations about Chinese food; we know what it's supposed to taste like, and we all expect to enjoy the food that we order.  Every Chinese restaurant will claim to meet these expectations and deliver the best quality Chinese food.  But unfortunately, most of us have had at least a few disappointing experiences where the restaurant fails to deliver the quality and taste that we expect.  For myself, I am particularly wary of Chinese restaurants that advertise an "all-you-can-eat" lunch special for $4.99.

In a similar way when enterprises look for a WAN optimization solution, they have certain expectations around obtaining LAN-like performance over their WAN, 90% data reduction, 6-month ROI, and being able to centralize their application servers into their data centers.  Most WAN optimization vendors claim to deliver the same capabilities as the market-leading Riverbed solution, but for a cheaper price.  But the unfortunate reality is that cheaper WAN optimization products usually fail to meet these expectations, especially for larger deployments.  As with Chinese food, just about the only reliable way to make the right choice to get a reference from someone who has deployed that solution before you.  All too many of us have found out the hard way that the advertised $4.99 lunch special does not consistently lead to good or even adequate-quality Chinese food.

The San Francisco Bay Area where I live is crowded with Chinese restaurants; it's a very competitive market.  To differentiate themselves, some Chinese restaurants in my area offer delivery service.  You don't need to physically go to the restaurant to get their product--the food will be virtually delivered to you after you order it online or over the phone.  Would you order from a restaurant that offers a virtual delivery service?  Of course, that decision would depend on the quality of the product that they offer.  If I had a bad experience with a specific restaurant while dining-in, then it certainly wouldn't matter to me if they offered delivery service or not...there's no way I would order food from that restaurant again with or without the delivery service.

In a similar way, there has been some discussion about the benefits and convenience of virtualized WOC products, including in a Network World article by Jim Metzler.  Jim makes a good point about the advantages of having the vendor deliver the product to you in a software-only virtual package...you don't have to physically take delivery of WOC hardware in order to obtain the product and its benefits.  Riverbed understands the advantages of a virtual software WOC that runs on any brand of server hardware, and has already announced the future availability of a virtualized Steelhead product.

But a key point missing from Jim's article is that any virtualized WOC is only as good as the underlying product and technology.  If the original physical WOC product exhibits issues and problems when running in your network environment, then why would the outcome be any different when using the virtualized software version of that same product?  Just as I would not order using the deliver service from a Chinese restaurant where the food does not fit my pallet, enterprises should not purchase virtualized WOC products from vendors where the original physical WOC doesn't work for their environment.

The ABCD's of WAN Optimization

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

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

Application Acceleration

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

Bandwidth Optimization

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

Consolidation / Cloud Computing

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

Disaster Recovery

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

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

Cloud security concerns

News of China's reported attempts to hack Google email accounts highlights the security-related risks and exposures of cloud computing.  Google's own perspectives on their experiences can be found here on Google SVP David Drummond's blog:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

Though Google's complaints about international cyber-attacks are currently front-page news, the reality is that thousands of other similar attacks on public computing infrastructures occur on a daily basis.

Certainly, computer security has always been an issue since the advent of the transistor.  But as computing infrastructures have grown increasingly interconnected through networking technologies, best practices and enabling technologies have always emerged to contain the associated security risks.  In this sense cloud computing is only the latest stage in the ongoing internetworking and consolidation of disparate computing infrastructures.  Accordingly, the advent of a new generation of security challenges should not be a surprise.  It would be a mistake to simply dismiss cloud computing opportunities because of the potential for new security risks. 

Large numbers of Riverbed customers have been able to realize a private cloud computing infrastructure by using Steelhead WAN optimization to consolidate their IT infrastructure into a smaller number of data centers.  But the case of these Riverbed customers, most believe that their security has improved as a result of their consolidation practices, because their data is now centralized and consolidated into a smaller number of hardened, secure data center facilities, rather than be scattered throughout various regional or branch offices each with varying security standards.

A private cloud infrastructure only hosts data in private data center facilities that are reliably protected by established firewall, VPN, IDS/IPS, and other security technologies and best practices.  For those enterprises that view the public cloud as in their future, the adoption of private cloud infrastructures in the interim can smooth the transition to and adoption of the public cloud.  For those enterprises where security concerns and business practices don't make the public cloud feasible, a private cloud will deliver many of the efficiencies and benefits of a shared IT infrastructure without many of the security risks.

"...so what's the story with Blue Coat?"

I recently met with the CIO of a large Riverbed customer.  During the course of our meeting, the CIO mentioned to me how an analyst firm had recommended to him that they look at Blue Coat for WAN optimization.  Though they are a happy Riverbed customer, he was curious enough to accept some Blue Coat devices into their lab for testing and evaluation.  What his team observed was a very complex and difficult-to-configure Blue Coat product that significantly underperformed Riverbed.

The CIO gave me a puzzled look and asked, "so what's the story with Blue Coat???"  The analyst had told him that they were the "market leader" in WAN optimization, but according to his team who had tested them, Blue Coat's products were essentially unusable for their network, at least for WAN optimization.  I am aware of a number of other customers who were disappointed--even angry--with their poor, sometimes-disastrous experiences with Blue Coat WAN optimization functionality.

Blue Coat is widely known as a security vendor, but they have made some startling claims about being the "market leader" in the WAN optimization. At least one analyst firm has believed these claims, which belie recent events surrounding Blue Coat as a company, such as:

1)  Recent layoffs of at least 10% of Blue Coat's existing employees -- It seems counter-intuitive that a "market leader" would be laying off employees just as the economy is coming out of a recession.  I would think that most market leaders would be hiring in order to maintain their leadership position during an economic recovery.

2)  Blue Coat moving 50 high-tech jobs to India -- Blue Coat seems to be obsessed with cutting costs instead of expanding their product leadership.  Tragically, Blue Coat rewards the US employees who engineered their supposedly "market leading" WAN optimization products by moving their jobs overseas.  Perhaps the real reason for the cost cutting is because Blue Coat's WAN optimization capabilities just aren't achieving satisfactory levels of customer acceptance.

3)  Blue Coat's mandatory shut-down and vacation time for all employees in December -- The WAN optimization market is very competitive.  But isn't Blue Coat jeopardizing their "leadership" by taking a break in a very competitive race?  If you were leading a highly-competitive marathon race, would you stop to take a coffee break?

4)  Blue Coat's 1% revenue growth in the latest quarterly financial report -- Unusual for a "market leader," Blue Coat's financial performance is anemic compared to most other high-tech companies.  And this was during a quarter in which the US economy experienced 2.8% growth, according to the US Commerce Department.

5)  Blue Coat's CEO disclosing that pure WAN optimization represents "less than a couple percent of overall product revenues." -- Blue Coat is the leader in WAN optimization, even though pure WAN optimization represents a very small part of Blue Coat's business.  Hmmm...something doesn't sound quite right with that statement...

The real story behind Blue Coat is that in 2006, they made ambitious plans to enter the WAN optimization market.  To spin their story and convince the market of their supposed leadership, Blue Coat uses sophisticated language such as "the Application Delivery Network (ADN)," terms that are meaningless to a hands-on IT professional, but impressive-sounding to casual observers.  But unfortunately for Blue Coat, the actual implementation of the WAN optimization features in their repurposed security product is a failure, and doesn't come close to achieving the eminence anticipated by their marketing team.  While Blue Coat maintains a healthy amount of business in their core security market, it appears their investments in WAN optimization have not panned-out, hence the need for cost-cutting.  What is now becoming evident is the disconnect between their marketing spin, and the reality of their failed WAN optimization efforts.

The Perfect Holiday Gift for the Citrix Lover: Steelhead Appliances

Dear Santa,

 

I have been a good user all year (except the photo-copier incident at the Annual Party, which I’m sure we’d all like to forget) and I think you probably have some end-of-year budget.  Anyway, if you and the IT elves could please review and give me the following, I’d be the happiest worker ever.  I want:

 

- Citrix to be much faster (it takes way too long now)

- Quicker download/upload of files

- Speedy applications

- More bandwidth

- A Red Ryder carbine-action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock.

 

Yours,

Joe User

 

Well, I’m sure you’ve received many similar holiday helpdesk requests already.  Good news, Riverbed is here to make the holidays happy for Citrix customers everywhere!

 

With RiOS 6.0, Steelhead appliances can easily optimize the WAN for Citrix ICA – up to 40% faster response times and 83% bandwidth reduction. Many Citrix customers have struggled with performance across the WAN, impacting end user acceptance and productivity.  Riverbed now has simplified configuration and enhanced QoS capabilities for Citrix delivering both bandwidth reduction and up to 40% better response times.  Just contact your local Riverbed team to order in time for the big day.

 

As for the Red Ryder air rifle, well, I’m sure your users would just shoot their eyes out, so better give them the Steelhead appliances for Citrix instead.

 

Best wishes for the holidays!

 

 

Mark your calendars for Riverbed's Accelerate '10 conference

It's official. Riverbed's Accelerate conference is slated for May 19-21 in Las Vegas.  This promises to be an outstanding event for customers, partners, or anyone interested in WAN optimization and IT infrastructure performance. There will be a variety of activities ranging from technical hands-on workshops and Riverbed product best practices to valuable sessions delivered by thought leaders and technical experts.  Not to mention the fact that this is the opportunity to interact with hundreds of your peers.

You can join the priority registration notification list here

I am looking forward to seeing you there!

Blue Coat CEO admits "We're in different market segments..."

"...our pure WAN op revenue as defined by just storage acceleration and general acceleration is I think less than a couple percent of our overall product revenue."

-- Brian Nesmith, CEO Blue Coat in 23 November 2009 earnings teleconference

In any emerging market there are vendors who are the true technology innovators, who through hard work and perseverance create truly innovative products that deliver real value to customers.  At the same time there are often vendors in neighboring spaces who copy ideas from technology leaders, and attempt to give the illusion of leadership and innovation in the emerging space through creative marketing messages.

This is certainly the case in the nascent WAN optimization market.  Riverbed's Steelhead solution has allowed thousands of enterprise customers to consolidate their IT assets, realizing what can now be described as a private cloud infrastructure.  The Riverbed solution has saved millions of dollars for enterprises around the world.

At the same time there are vendors such as Blue Coat, who are established in neighboring markets--in this case web security.  Thinking that they could reproduce Riverbed's success, in 2006 Blue Coat introduced WAN optimization features into their flagship security product, the ProxySG.

But in WAN optimization, success has been elusive for Blue Coat. Their problem was that in bakeoff after bakeoff, customers consistently choose Riverbed instead of their repurposed security product whenever WAN optimization is tested and evaluated.  Of course, Blue Coat continues to have success in their core web security market, and up until recently their good fortune in that neighboring market allowed them to mask the failure in WAN optimzation.

Blue Coat will likely experience continued success in pursuing the web security market.  But after three years of fruitless attempts to penetrate the WAN optimization market, the Blue Coat CEO is finally admitting failure in competing against Riverbed.

Anatomy of a live stage demo at Interop - Side-stepping Murphy's Law

With my 17+ years experience working with various technology companies, I should have known better that the live demo I signed up to both prepare and present during Interop 2009 in NYC would be much more challenging than originally anticipated.

Riverbed interview about cloud computing product direction

Bob Gilbert and Eric Wolford discuss cloud computing and Riverbed's recent announcement regarding a product direction for accelerating cloud environments.

Eliminate Help Desk Headaches: Emile Rashkovich of Sentinel Real Estate

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

How is virtualization like Walmart?

Riverbed Senior Director of Product Marketing discusses how virtualization is like Walmart and how Riverbed can help from his Interop New York presentation earlier today. 

Customer Testimonials at Interop New York

Join us for an exciting final day InterOp New York!  In addition to the product demonstrations that are taking place throughout the day a number of our customers will be joining us to share their experiences with you in our main presentation theater.  Don't miss this opportunity to see our products in action and to hear how some of the worlds leading organizations are relying on Riverbed to improve the performance of their IT infrastructure.

Interop New York Schedule: Thursday 19 November

11:45a	Customer Speaker:  Rockford Health Systems - Joe Granneman
1:30p	Customer Speaker:  DTCC - Rahul Arya
2:00p	Customer Speaker:  Jacobs - Sean Byars
2:30p	Customer Speaker:  Turner Padget, David Michael
3:00p	Customer Speaker:  Dennis Jansson, Lantmannen
3:30p	Wii Giveaway

The Demo God

Josh Tseng talks about the live product demonstration Riverbed will be performing throughout the Interop show.

And here is the demo.  Great job Josh!  Only 50+ more to go.

Branch Office Box with Riverbed

Naveen Prabhu talks about how the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) provides a facility for running up to 5 services like domain controller, DNS/DHCP, video streaming, and even security.

Accelerate, Assess, and Adapt with Riverbed

Alex Alvarez discusses how Riverbed's Cascade product provides detailed visibility into network and application traffic. In fact, Cascade is setup to monitor all Interop traffic and Alex has some interesting tidbits to share about the current findings.

The public cloud will be the way to leverage the IT dollar

Thomas Prokop, Manager of Information and Remote Services at Prokop attended Riverbed's Cloud9 event in New York and answered the "what does the cloud mean to you?" question.

The Cloud is the Future

At Riverbed's Cloud9 party during Interop in New york, Michael Vassallo, Sr. Network Administrator at Dancker, Sellew, Douglas, offered his opinion on what the cloud means.

Eating our own dogfood, part 3

 
 "Cisco has approximately 300 global offices that have less than 45Mbps bandwidth.  Cisco partner IBM will deploy Cisco WAAS in these offices during the remainder of 2008 and part of fiscal year 2009. Configuring the WAN gateway at each office to intercept certain requests and forward them to the Cisco WAE will take only a few minutes..."

-- from Cisco IT Deployment in Progress, Wide Area Application Services document (dated 2008)

Several months ago I posted my first dogfood blog (http://blog.riverbed.com/2009/06/rtp-eating-our-own-dogfood.html).  In response to that blog, Cisco has been evasive and unclear about whether or not they really use WAAS internally, all while promising that an internal WAAS rollout will be taking place in the future (see also Feng Meng's WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration Case Study blog, dated June 2009).

Now that more than four months have passed, I think it's time to revisit the question again.  My contacts within Cisco IT continue to indicate there is still no signficant WAAS deployment in their production network. Why has Cisco still not executed a world-wide deployment of WAAS in their own network?  Why won't they eat their own dogfood?  Cisco certainly has had more than enough time to complete a worldwide rollout (each WAAS device takes only a few minutes to configure, right?).  Furthermore, Cisco has sold the WAAS product for more than five years at this point, and it seems rather disingenuous for them to sell it to their customers while not using it themselves internally.

Perhaps the real problem is that WAAS faces fundamental issues when deployed in large networks.  One well-known issue is that WAAS uses a per-peer data store.  If you are not familiar with this issue, details about the per-peer data store can be found in my previous blog:

http://blog.riverbed.com/2009/01/riverbeds-universal-data-store.html

Because of its per-peer data store architecture, the core data center WAAS device has dedicated data stores that each match the data store of each remote WAAS device.  For example, a Cisco WAVE-574 appliance has 120GB of DRE storage capacity, and is roughly equivalent to a mid-range Steelhead 1050L.  A core WAAS device in the data center must allocate 120GB of its DRE storage capacity to communicate with and fully utilize the DRE resources of each remote WAVE-574 device at each branch office.  But if Cisco were to deploy a WAVE-574 appliances to each of their 300 branch offices, that would mean a total of 36 TB of DRE storage will be needed in Cisco's core data center.  Since the largest WAAS appliance, the WAE-7371, has 1TB of DRE storage capacity each, this would mean that 36 WAE-7371 appliances would have to be deployed in Cisco's core data center!

Having to deploying 36 WAE-7371 is quite problematic, because they're not cheap at a list price of $129,000 each.  In contrast, Riverbed uses a universal data store architecture, and consequently there is no artificial edge-to-core fan-out ratio driven by data store sizing for the Riverbed solution.  In fact, only about three core Steelhead 6050's would provide a fully-redundant clustered solution for Cisco's internal network, assuming they have about about 18,000 remote users (an average 60 employees distributed to each of Cisco's 300 sites).  Having to deploy 36 (thirty-six) WAE-7371 vs. Riverbed's alternative of just three Steelhead 6050 leads to a huge difference in the price of the overall solution.

But even if Cisco's IT organization was given 36 large WAE-7371 applicances at no cost, and ordered by Cisco management to deploy WAAS, they still face some daunting challenges.  For example, it would be unrealistic for them to serially-chain those 36 appliances in an in-path/in-line configuration.  Using WCCP would be problematic too, because the maximum number of devices in a WCCP cluster is only 32.  The ACE load balancer isn't a good solution either, because it can't address the asymmetrically-routed network traffic that likely exists in Cisco's data centers.

So if the above analysis is correct, it seems that the real reason why Cisco hasn't deployed WAAS is simply that it just wont' scale for Cisco's internal network.  Cisco's dogfood is simply too much to swallow, even for Cisco themselves.  It is a pity that Cisco's internal IT can't use Riverbed, because Riverbed has successfully deployed Steelheads throughout a number of network environments that are far larger than Cisco's.  Here's an example of one happy Riverbed customer who has deployed 700 Steelheads:  http://wdsforum.org/rvrb/board/message?board.id=halloffame&thread.id=140

Steelhead Mobile 3.0 - The Riverbed Prancing Horse?

Since the year 2000 Ferarri has won six  Formula 1 Drivers' Championships, seven Constructors' Championship, and four FIA GT2 Championships but those awards pale in comparison to the impact the company's famed prancing horse icon has when it pulls up to an intersection of a crowded city street.  While only an erudite few may know who Michael Schumacher is or other details from the storied brands recent success, virtually everyone who sees the distinctive Italian cars recognize them as the ultimate driving machines.   Whether a Ferrari is built for the track or the street it is understood that what makes these cars so highly coveted is the understanding that the singular vision of every model they produce is unmitigated performance.  The Riverbed product family share these characteristics as both the Steelhead Appliance and Steelhead Mobile are powered by the same Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) which is what makes today's announcement of the release of Steelhead Mobile 3.0 so exciting.  Steelhead Mobile 3.0 gives IT managers the opportunity to simplify their network infrastructure by offering a single solution to the problems that plague performance 

Whether in the office or on the road, improved integration with the Steelhead appliance allows workers to bring even more of the benefits of the Riverbed Optimization System with them wherever they go. Speed is no longer a barrier to mobility with new protocol optimizations, expanded platform and operating system support, and client developments that improve the performance of the entire Riverbed Technology deployment.  With this release we introduce:

    • Acceleration for Windows 7 and 64-bit Systems
    • Web Applications – up to 20X to 60X faster
    • Branch Warming – Enhanced acceleration for your entire Riverbed deployment.

To learn more about these exciting new features and to try it for yourself, check out What's New With Steelhead Mobile to give your organization Ferrari like performance everywhere!

RiOS 6.0 and Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is clearly one of the today's hot IT topics, and many IT professionals are trying to understand how they can leverage cloud computing concepts.  After all, who wouldn't want to offload their time-intensive and mundane tasks of maintaining servers and other IT infrastructure to a cloud services provider, especially if they can do it cheaper and more efficiently than you can? 

Of course, once you outsource and virtualize your IT assets, the WAN becomes an increasingly important component of your infrastructure, since your end-users will now use the WAN infrastructure to access their cloud-hosted information assets.  Without WAN optimization, endusers may become disappointed and disillusioned with cloud computing initiatives that promise to increase IT efficiency.

For years, Riverbed has delivered best-of-breed WAN optimization solutions that facilitate access over the WAN to remote computing assets hosted in remote data centers; these same capabilities are just as applicable to computing assets that are hosted in the Cloud.  But the newly-available RiOS 6.0 provides a number of new features and capabilities that further enhance and extend Riverbed's capabilites for cloud environments, including the following:

1.  Optimization for Oracle 12, including for JRE clients -- With RiOS 6.0, Riverbed is the first and currently the only WAN optimization vendor to support optimizations for Oracle 11i and 12.  With newly-added support for Sun JRE clients, Riverbed can now optimize end-user access to cloud-hosted Oracle E-Business Suite applications, including not only Sun JRE, but also through Oracle JInitiator, HTTP, and HTTPS (SSL).

2.  Enhanced optimization for virtual terminal traffic -- RiOS 6.0 offers enhanced capabilities to optimize RDP and Citrix ICA traffic that may be used to access and/or manage remotely-hosted applications in the cloud.  Steelheads now offer the capability to dynamically disable the default encryption and compression for ICA, allowing them to apply Riverbed's SDR byte-level data reduction algorithms to the raw Citrix data.  RiOS 6.0 is also able to individually apply enhanced QoS enforcement policies to Citrix virtual channels found in the ICA traffic.

3.  Enhanced HTTP optimization -- RiOS 6.0 introduces an object prefetch table for cached web objects.  This feature complies with all HTTP 1.0 (RFC 1945) and HTTP 1.1 (RFC 2616) caching specifications and requirements, and it further adds to Riverbed's previously-available HTTP optimization capabilities (i.e., connection pooling, URL learning, parse and prefetch, and 304 fast response) for accelerating web applications that may be hosted in the cloud.

Today, a number of enterprises are already planning to use Riverbed to support their cloud-hosted applications.  For example, Riverbed is working with several Fortune 500 companies who are actively planning to use the Steelhead solution to optimize access by 10,000+ employees to Sharepoint and Exchange servers hosted at Microsoft Online Services.  The new capabilities introduced in RiOS 6.0 will only further enhance and expand opportunities for these and other enterprises to leverage cloud computing infrastructures.

Macintosh support in RiOS 6.0

 
Larry Chaffin's blog (http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/46493) in Network World highlights Riverbed's optimization for Macintosh as one of the key new features in the upcoming RiOS 6.0 software release.  Although Riverbed is also introducing a number of other significant new features in RiOS 6.0, Larry believes Mac optimization will further separate Riverbed from the competition.  Riverbed is the first and currently the only WAN optimization vendor to announce explicit support for CIFS latency optimization for Mac clients using Leopard OS versions 10.5 and later.

Larry's blog comments are notable because use of Macintosh machines appears to be on the rise.  Apple announced just a few days ago on October 19 sales of 3.05 million Mac machines in their most recent quarter, which is a significant 17 percent year-over-year increase from the same quarter in 2008. 

Why is Riverbed's specially-engineered CIFS optimization for Macintosh important?  Although Mac workstations use the same CIFS protocol that Windows machines use to access files over the network, the actual CIFS implementation in the Leopard OSX operating system has some very significant differences compared to the Windows CIFS implementation.  Specifically, the Macintosh CIFS implementations use oplocks differently, and request different file attributes compared to the Windows CIFS implementation.  Use of a WAN optimization product that fails to recognize these significant differences will result in very slow data transfers for certain file requests, or even worse--risk data corruption in a multi-user environment. 

For these reasons, all Steelhead software releases prior to RiOS 6.0 would only apply data reduction--and not application streamlining--to Macintosh traffic when they recognized it, in order to avoid further slowing it down or potentially risking data corruption.  Riverbed is the only WAN optimization vendor who has announced implementation-specific CIFS optimizations for the Macintosh Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6) operating systems, providing further evidence of Riverbed's product and technology leadership in the WAN optimization market.  With the availability of RiOS 6.0, Macintosh workstations in enterprise networks can now enjoy performance benefits such as those experienced by Riverbed customer ESA (performance graph shown below).

So Good it's Spooky

Ever feel like you’re lost in the wilderness on a dark and stormy night?  Are you wondering what’s going to jump out and bite you?  Who knows what terrors lurk just ahead?

 

All kinds of eerie threats loom in the dark for the unwitting IT professional.  Luckily, Riverbed has got your back and will bail you out of all kinds of IT scares with the introduction of RiOS 6.0 just in time for Halloween.

 

Speed away from client performance vampires with new magic offering huge improvements for Citrix virtual desktops, Mac clients for file sharing, Oracle and other web-based applications.

 

Scale up to conquer the DR bottlenecked goblins with new powers to dynamically adapt your data streamlining to suit the workload and environment, giving you top throughput and best bandwidth optimization, even for the biggest data protection requirements.

 

Simplify the fight with management complexity gremlins with new sorcery showing both optimization and pass-through traffic.  You can also easily integrate with your network and management tools, and quickly set up the security features you require to keep you safe.

 

Select your weapons against the rising branch server ghouls with the Riverbed Services Platform, now including a watchdog to guard against virtual machine failure and flexibility to grow virtual disks or deploy virtually-inpath.

 

Whatever you fear, Riverbed is here for you with RiOS 6.0.  We’ll get you through the darkest hours.  The rest is all fun and candy.

Read more about RiOS 6.0 features here.

Accelerate 2010 - The Riverbed Performance Summit

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

A few of the topics that we are considering are:

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

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

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

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

The value of WAN optimization

 

"Price is what you pay.  Value is what you get."

- Warren Buffett

 

According to wikipedia, a commodity is some good which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.  In other words, the value of a commodity product does not depend on who you purchase it from.  For example, gold that you buy from some fancy jeweler has the same intrinsic value as the gold that you buy from a precious metals wholesaler.

In high tech it can be argued that there are some product categories that have been commoditized.  For example, Ethernet switches are available from a number of different network equipment vendors.  While each individual switch product might have specific features and capabilities that make them appear unique, in most cases switches from any given vendor can be made to fulfill a general network requirement.  Given this observation, it often makes sense to purchase Ethernet switches from the lowest-price vendor.

But the idea of a commoditized WAN optimization market is encouraged and promoted by vendors who know they have serious deficiencies in their WAN optimization products.  These vendors know that their WAN optimization products are inferior to Riverbed, and therefore they need to offer significantly lower prices in order to compensate.

The fact is lower prices do not address the product's deficiencies as far as functionality is concerned.  Lower prices do not affect the scalability of the product for large deployments.  Lower prices do not affect the ability of the product to facilitate consolidation and removal of remote servers.  Lower prices do not allow that product to eliminate data centers and thereby save $millions of dollars per year.  Lower prices do not make the cheaper WAN optimization product more capable in any way. 

I have personally witnessed how customers who purchase the cheaper WAN optimization product struggle for months or years, and in many cases eventually have to remove it from their networks.  Their original mistake:  thinking that the value of a WAN optimization offering is somehow inversely related to the price that they pay for it.

Different Country...Same Decision

 

The effects of jet lag wake me up...it's now 2am in Mumbai, India as I begin to write this blog.  On this trip I have met with some large potential customers who are evaluating Riverbed.  Although the cultural surroundings of these meetings are different, the topics we discussed are very much the same as in meetings I regularly have with customers in the US--specifically, the customers want to know what the differences are between Riverbed, Cisco WAAS, and other competitive offerings.

Every week I meet with IT organizations who wrestle with these same questions.  I remember a number of months ago meeting with executives from Lantmannen.  After a careful evaluation process, they ultimately chose Riverbed.  As a result of their decision, Lantmannen executives now estimate that they will save more than $60 million over five years.  More details about Lantmannen's Riverbed experience can be found in CIO Magazine.  The online edition of the article can be accessed here:

http://www.cio.com/article/500495/WAN_Optimization_Maximizing_a_Global_Investment

Many other customers have experienced benefits similar to what Lantamannen has received with Riverbed.  You can read about some of their personal accounts in Riverbed's community forum (http://wdsforum.org/rvrb/board?board.id=halloffame). 

But not every prospective customer chooses Riverbed.  Some are attracted by the lower pricing of competitive offerings.  Often brand loyalty plays a part, and the purchase rationale often involves an assumption that Cisco's WAAS product is "good enough."  I also have regular opportunities to meet with these customers, often months or years after their fateful decision to purchase WAAS.  The experiences they relate to me are not pleasant.  A common theme is that while they were able to get a small number of WAAS devices working, complications arose as the size of the deployment grew.  What was originally envisioned to be a 60-site deployment had to be scaled down to something significantly smaller.  After struggling through many months of frustration and futility, real-life WAN performance requirements forced them to take another look at Riverbed.

The customers I have met in India face the same decision.  Having tested Riverbed, they clearly want the Steelhead solution, but they are being tempted by Cisco's offer of 80% or greater discounts for WAAS.  It is the same situation to that faced by many other customers around the world.

The difference between a lightning bug and lightning bug - linking access and performance with mobile workers

The advent of "internet everywhere" is reflective of the interconnectedness of global business and like laces in a shoe serves to draw the world and business opportunities closer, while simultaneously increasing competition. Supporting workers while they are away from the office and looking to capture these opportunities can be the difference between IT acting as a competitive edge and IT acting as an impedance to business success. The difference between the two is not merely access but performance.

Forrester Research Analyst Chris Silva recently wrote a piece on the ZDNet Blog "It's Flue Season: Connect and Optimize Your Workers" about the importance of considering both access and performance when supporting mobile workers. Composed at 30,000 feet while on a flight from St. Louis to San Diego Chris's experience working over a 5.5 miles in the air is by no means unique and underscores how varied the locations are where work is gets done.  As he points out, continuity of operations and disaster recovery plans only focus on access and not performance, when in truth access and performance are two sides of the same coin. Both are equally to important consideration to ensure that mobile workers operate as effectively away from the office as they do when they are in it.  

Workers maybe able access resources from variable locations, but when away from their carefully architected IT environments they face inconsistent connection types, costs and user volumes, low bandwidth links (eg 3G data cards) which are easily overwhelmed by application usage, and high latency all of which conspire against mobile worker performance. Silva refers to mobile WAN optimization products like Steelhead Mobile playing a crucial role in bridging the gap between merely allowing someone to work away from the office and enabling them to perform. As our always on society introduces greater competition between firms and the threat of any interruption in work demands well designed business continuity and disaster recovery plans Steelhead Mobile and its ability to ensure both access and performance become even more crucial.  

I thought that Chris Silva did a fantastic job articulating this point and encourage everyone to read this and all of his posts on the ZDNet site. For more information about how Steelhead Mobile can help you provide your mobile workers with both the access and performance that they need when they are away from the office check out http://www.riverbed.com/products/steelhead_mobile/

Riverbed thanks Cisco for their great QA work on the Steelhead

At Riverbed, we are committed to improving the Steelhead product by adding new features and capabilities.  As with any software product, an unfortunate side-effect of our efforts to improve our product is that software bugs can result. Our QA and engineering teams do their best to identify and resolve every known bug in the Steelhead software before it is released, but on occasion bugs can be discovered by our customers in their network environments.  After all, the Steelhead solution is tested daily in very demanding environments by thousands of Riverbed customers, including in some of the largest and most complex IP networks in the world. 

When bugs are reported to Riverbed, we take them very seriously.  However, imagine our surprise earlier in the summer of this year when we received a report of a bug that was discovered not by a Riverbed customer, but by Cisco Systems!  Well, like I said, we're happy to improve our software, even if by taking a clue from a competitor, so we took this bug report very seriously.

Perhaps a little bit of background is in order here.  Although the bug was discovered by Cisco, it was actually reported to Riverbed by a customer who was being shown a demonstration of the bug over a webex session.  You see, Cisco was trying to convince the customer that Riverbed's product couldn't handle high traffic loads because of a failure that occurred when the Steelhead 6020 is exposed to 5000 TCP connections generated by a Spirent tester using a specific traffic profile (i.e., HTTP connections).  Cisco ignored the fact that Riverbed already has hundreds of customers using the same Steelhead 6020 to optimize as many as 40,000 TCP connections, and they attempted to characterize this problem with the 5000 connections not as a bug, but as an overall Riverbed limitation.  The customer was suspicious, and alerted us as to what Cisco was doing.

We received enough clues to reconstruct how Cisco contrived the test, and were able to replicate the bug event in our own labs.  Here are some additional details on what we found about the bug:

• No Riverbed customers have reported this bug to Riverbed.  It doesn't show up in real-life networks.

• The bug ONLY occurs with HTTP connections, because it is specific to Riverbed's HTTP optimization feature, whereas Cisco WAAS has no comparable HTTP optimization feature.

• The bug only occurs when a large number (~5000) of HTTP connections all simultaneously issue GET operations for large web objects, in this case web objects that are 1MB in size.  In a normal real-life environment, web objects are typically only a few KB in size.

• For those environments that do involve large web objects (e.g., Sharepoint files), the bug will not be triggered as long as GET requests do not happen simultaneously across all 5000 active HTTP sessions.  Since in real-life applications do not exhibit this behavior, no Riverbed customers have complained about this bug.

• If the HTTP optimization blade is disabled, then the bug will not occur.  Any customers who are concerned could simply disable the HTTP feature (and Cisco WAAS has no equivalent feature), and the bug will not appear.  They can re-enable HTTP optimization when the Steelhead is updated with the bug fix from the Riverbed support website.

I would like to inform concerned parties--including our competitor Cisco--that the bug has been resolved, and the fix is now available on the Riverbed support website, in the recently-available RiOS 5.5.5 release.  Following our stringent quality standards, we have spent the last several weeks testing and validating the fix, and are now comfortable-enough to release it.  But once again, the credit goes to Cisco for finding this obscure and difficult-to-find bug, and we thank them for their diligent efforts.  For those who don't intend to run Cisco's contrived tests, this software upgrade is purely optional and not required.

In an attempt to legitimize their contrived test, Cisco has "commissioned" Miercom to document this obscure Riverbed bug.  The Miercom document (document number 090815B) can be accessed here:

http://www.miercom.com/dl.html?fid=20090915&type=report

For anyone who has any illusions that Miercom's reports are objective in any way, you may also want to consider other Miercom reports that favor other WAN optimization solutions:

Citrix WANScaler: http://www.citrix.com/site/resources/dynamic/salesdocs/CitrixSystems_8800.pdf

Silver Peak: http://www.miercom.com/dl.html?fid=20051207&type=report&PHPSESSID=c8e84098c29b5e9d1f687962c2833950

Blue Coat (formerly Packeteer): 

http://www.miercom.com/dl.html?fid=20070914&type=report&PHPSESSID=507081d1bfb92c4dfdfedf78268a4258

With all of the above reports from Miercom each recommending a different vendor, how is one to determine which is truly the vendor that they recommend for WAN optimization?  Rather, it appears that Miercom recommends any vendor that has recently paid them a "commission." 

At Riverbed, we're flattered by all the attention Cisco is devoting to their chief competitor in WAN optimization.  And we appreciate the help they are giving us in finding bugs to improve the Steelhead solution. But on the other hand I'm sure Cisco's existing WAAS customers might be somewhat dismayed by all of the resources that Cisco is placing into their competition's product.  Why is Cisco spending their precious QA resources testing and identifying bugs in their competitor's product, when their own customers suffer and struggle with the poor software quality that afflicts WAAS? And why is Cisco focusing on finding obscure bugs in simulated WANs when their own WAAS customers are suffering from WAAS bugs and that happen in real WAN environments? 

Click on the following link to view Riverbed's full response to Cisco's paid-for Miercom report:

>>Download Riverbed response to Miercom report 090815B<<

 

10 Key Questions that Blue Coat doesn't want you to ask them

In any emerging market there are vendors who are technology innovators, and there are incumbent vendors in neighboring spaces who attempt to claim leadership in the emerging area through innovative marketing.  WAN optimization is no exception to this observation.  While it is easy to update web sites and data sheets with the "correct" marketing message, and to add superficial features that mimic a competitor's product, it is far harder to build a truly innovative product that creates value for customers.

Although Blue Coat has a 10+ year history focused on web caching and web security, they have recently made aggressive claims regarding market leadership in WAN optimization.  To validate these claims of leadership, I have listed 10 key questions that are important for any Blue Coat customer to explore:

10)  How can Blue Coat scale WAN optimization deployments if their ProxySG product uses a per-peer data store architecture for the Byte Cache?  In an earlier blog, I discussed this important issue that affects both Blue Coat and Cisco WAAS:  http://blog.riverbed.com/2009/01/riverbeds-universal-data-store.html

9)  If the write-back setting for CIFS acceleration involves data integrity risks, then why would Blue Coat enable this feature by default?  Page 70 of Volume 2 in the Blue Coat SGOS 5.4 manual warns that data loss can occur if the WAN experiences a disconnect while using Blue Coat's CIFS write-back feature.  Personally, I would think that risk of data loss is serious-enough of a consequence that this write-back feature should be disabled by default.  Note that unlike Blue Coat, the Riverbed Steelhead does not use a cache architecture, and therefore does not add any new risk of data loss or corruption for CIFS acceleration.  This is certainly proven out by the thousands of Riverbed customers who are actively using the Steelhead solution in its default configuration for CIFS acceleration.

8)  How many Blue Coat customers are using ProxySG for WAN optimization of non-web traffic?  This is a question that Blue Coat has steadfastly refused to answer, as if they didn't know (and what market leader wouldn't know what their products are being used for?).  But in a 2 June 2009 teleconference, Blue Coat CEO Brian Nesmith gave a clue by stating, "In [pure] WAN optimization, we win deals based on our ability to accelerate two key application areas -- secure web applications and video streaming."  Associating web applications with WAN optimization is a clever word-play, because it allows Blue Coat to claim leadership in WAN optimization on the basis of legacy web caching features and capabilities that they have offered since the 1990's.

7)  Why is there so little discussion about WAN optimization on Blue Coat's community forums?  If Blue Coat is truly the leader in WAN optimization, then I would expect their customers to be actively discussing WAN optimization topics in Blue Coat's community forums.  This is certainly the case with Riverbed's community forums (www.wdsforum.org), and you also see some discussion about WAAS and WAN optimization in Cisco's NetPro forums.  But in the case of Blue Coat's community forums (http://forums.bluecoat.com/viewforum.php?f=1&sid=e3b8f8d5d2c10d9f75c47d6b0c9503f0), the discussion seems exclusively focused on web security topics such as how to filter You Tube.  There is almost no discussion at all about WAN optimization (or at least how the general market would define WAN optimization).

6)  How does Blue Coat's dual Object Cache/Byte Cache architecture affect ProxySG's ability to scale throughput and performance?  Most computer systems bottleneck performance on disk I/O, unless you're talking about an embedded disk-less system.  After all, disk seek/read/write times are much slower than RAM memory access times, and I would think the same to be true for Blue Coat's caching systems.  But the difference with Blue Coat compared to Riverbed is that ProxySG must read and write cached data on disk twice--once in the Object Cache, and again in the Byte Cache.  Having to read and write the same data to disk two times should raise throughput/performance scalability concerns.  In contrast, with Riverbed data is only represented once on disk, in the byte-level SDR data store.

5)  Why is Blue Coat's user manual 3000 pages long?  Does this indicate that the product is difficult to use?  Ease-of-use and simplicity are key elements of a solution that can be deployed and maintained in large networks.  A complex product breeds more complexity and frustration.

4)  Why would Blue Coat as a "security" vendor offer a product lacking disk encryption for persistent disk data?  Any vendor with substantional deployments in WAN optimization would know that customers will be using them in all types of office locations, including small branch offices which may lack adequate security over weekends and evenings.  An intruder can easily steal the disk drives of the ProxySG device, which store in cleartext passwords, security certificates, credit card numbers and any other data that users send over supposedly-secure SSL connections.

3)  When will Blue Coat deliver a one-box solution for WAN optimization/web security/QoS/traffic monitoring?  This was the original promise of Blue Coat's acquisition of Packeteer, but it appears the long-awaited integrated one-product solution will not happen at all.  In contrast, Riverbed's RSP provides the framework to deliver WAN optimization, web security, QoS enforcement, and traffic monitoring capabilities, all in a single Steelhead appliance.

2)  Why are PacketShaper revenues declining?  According to SEC documents, historic PacketShaper product revenues (not including support or services revenue) from before their acquisition by Blue Coat exceeded $25M per quarter over several quarters in 2006 and 2007.  But Blue Coat's most recent PacketShaper quarterly product revenues amounted to only $15M.  It appears PacketShaper is losing significant revenue.

1)  Can Blue Coat scale WAN optimization for non-Web traffic?  As noted in question 8 above, it seems Blue Coat is largely claiming leadership in WAN optimization based on their legacy ability to cache web traffic.  And I have no doubt that Blue Coat can deploy web caches and proxies to 100's of sites.  But my question is can Blue Coat's WAN optimization features for CIFS and Exchange be scaled for full deployment in large networks?  There is no evidence to support that they can.  Rather, the evidence indicates that when you exclude web cache deployments, most Blue Coat WAN optimization deployments are quite small--three to nine boxes according to Blue Coat CEO Brian Nesmith in a 25 Aug 2009 teleconference.

Technology company boosts 3G performance to 5G speeds

As is the case with millions of remote workers, I rely on my 3G network card for network connectivity when I travel with my laptop away from the office.  I would probably be considered by many as an extreme road warrior as I spend up to 50% or more of my time traveling to customer locations, marketing events, and speaking opportunities throughout the US and around the globe.  My 3G connection is my lifeline when I am away of the office and need to access my email, need to work from my company's corporate intranet, or when I need to grab the latest office documents or creative assets from one of the central file servers.  While 3G provides the remote connectivity I need, there is one little problem...

Top 10 things Cisco must do to catch up to Riverbed

For the past five years, Cisco has been trying hard...real hard..to catch up to Riverbed.  It must be frustrating, because every time Cisco makes some progress in terms of introducing features, Riverbed seems to pull even further away with still more new capabilities.  To illustrate what I mean, I've compiled a partial list of things that Cisco still must do to catch up to Riverbed.

10.  Fix the WAAS per-peer data store and make it more like Riverbed's universal data store -- Unless they do this, WAAS simply won't scale as well as the Riverbed Steelhead solution.  Just imagine, in a network with 100 remote sites, the core Cisco WAAS device in the data center would store 100 times as much data as the Riverbed device in an equivalent deployment.  Here is a link to my previous blog on this issue:

http://blog.riverbed.com/2009/01/riverbeds-universal-data-store.html

9.  Get rid of the CIFS caching architecture -- The caching approach stores all CIFS data to disk twice, once in DRE, and a second time in the CIFS cache.  Can't be good for scaling performance when WAAS has to do roughly twice the I/O operations to disk as the equivalent Riverbed device in order to optimize CIFS performance.

8.  Grow WAAS revenues, not shrink them -- In the recent July (FYQ4/2009) quarter, Cisco's Application Networking business unit--the group that sells WAAS--shrank revenues by 27% year-over-year.  This comes on the heels of the prior quarter where the same business unit shrank revenues by 31% year-over-year.  Analysts such as Gartner have also noted a very significant shrinkage in market share by Cisco WAAS in the recent quarter.

7.  Optimize asymmetrically-routed traffic without relying on WCCP -- Let's face it, asymmetrically-routed traffic is common in large networks.  Cisco's requirement to use WCCP in such networks makes WAAS very difficult to manage and deploy, and is yet another reason why WAAS doesn't scale for large networks.

6.  Support something other than just Windows Core Services and ACNS on their virtual blade -- With Riverbed customers can deploy a full version of Windows, as well as Checkpoint, Infoblox, and a number of other 3rd-party vendor apps.  Many customers are also able to install their own custom applications into Riverbed's RSP and Windows running on RSP.  See my previous blog on RSP: http://blog.riverbed.com/2009/03/riverbed-services-platformworth-the-upgrade.html

5.  Improve software quality -- Even a feature-packed product is useless unless the software is stable.  According to Cisco's own product release notes documentation, the most recent WAAS 4.1.3 software has more "open caveats" (documented known bugs) than any previous major WAAS software release.  This can't be a good sign for a product that is supposedly mature or maturing.

4.  Catch up to Riverbed's 6500-customer installed base -- Cisco's most recent claim (Oct 2008) is that 3000 customers have purchased WAAS, and that number appears to include many who have since switched to Riverbed.

3.  Stop copying Riverbed and start innovating for once -- From RSP, to Steelhead Mobile, to NFS and SSL optimization, Cisco has always been in the mode of trying to catch up to Riverbed, by copying features and capabilities that Riverbed introduces first.  Admittedly, this is hard to do, especially when there continues to be a laundry list of missing features in WAAS that are available in the Riverbed solution.  But a sign of a true leader in any market is a vendor that innovates, and offers customers new capabilities that were not previously available.

2.  Demonstrate a truly large, enterprise-wide WAAS deployment that optimizes all TCP/IP traffic -- When you look into the details of each real-world WAAS deployment, they typically involve a relatively small number of WAAS devices deployed to support only a small portion of the customer's overall enterprise network, and/or a limited subset of the customer's TCP-based application traffic.  In contrast, Riverbed has many customers who have deployed hundreds of Steelhead appliances, including some customers who have Steelheads at every location in their enterprise network.

1.  Eat their own (WAAS) dogfood  If Cisco is selling WAAS to their customers, then they should be using WAAS in their own internal network.  And I'm not talking about just pilot testing.  While Cisco's internal IT organization is happy to use other Cisco products, they don't seem to be comfortable with WAAS.  My original blog about this issue (http://blog.riverbed.com/2009/06/rtp-eating-our-own-dogfood.html) has been met with silence from Cisco.  Since WAAS is not a new product anymore (Cisco has been selling it for almost five years), there is no excuse for Cisco not eating their own WAAS dogfood.

Since 2004 when Cisco acquired the original WAAS product, many have predicted that Cisco would catch up to Riverbed.  Year after year, Cisco promises that the next WAAS software release will truly be the "Riverbed killer."  And yet from all appearances it seems Cisco is further behind Riverbed than they ever have been in the past.

WAN Optimization and Thin Clients

"The era of the PC is almost over, and the era of the [thin client] is about to begin..."

Larry Ellison, March 8, 1996, in a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California

Well, it hasn't happened yet.  But even now, more than 13 years after Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy made their bold declarations about the future of network computing, there are still many who continue to see thin clients as the next major paradigm shift in computing.  Note that I'm not talking about just desktop virtualization as a tool--I'm refering to the utopia that they envision where all applications are centrally-hosted.  Perhaps it can still happen in the future, but we have learned quite a few things from more than a decade of attempts at applying thin-client principles to real-life computing requirements.  More likely than not, the future will involve at least some involvement from full thick-client PC's, if not continued dominance of the prevailing client-server computing model.

In a previous blog, I described how Riverbed is able to optimize the transfer of network traffic from thin client computing platforms.  But on the other hand, the advancement of WAN optimization technologies over the past few years now affords new break-through solutions for remote computing, where the thin client approach was previously believed to be the only viable option.  Could it be that maturation of WAN optimization technologies will not only preserve the trusty client-server computing model, but also threaten the bottom line of certain vendors such as Citrix who continue to yearn for that thin client utopia?

Both WAN optimization and thin client computing have common goals of centralizing and consolidating servers into the main data center, but that is about where their comonality ends.  Though WAN optimization is a more recently-available technology, thin client computing approaches have been explored and investigated for more than a decade.  And one of its most glaring disappointments has been the high cost.  Originally, thin client technology was supposed to be cheap.  That was one of the original attractions--deploy low-cost hardware at the branch offices.  But as we all know now, those Citrix software licensing fees are very expensive and a huge cost burden to many IT departments.

After 5 years at Riverbed, I have become somewhat jaded by the impressive reports of fast LAN-like performance for CIFS, Exchange, NFS, HTTP/SSL, etc.  All Riverbed customers experience these benefits, and I am not the least bit surprised by these reports.  But on a recent trip to Asia, I ran into multiple customers who are now telling me that they are also removing Citrix XenApp licenses from their branch offices that receive Steelhead appliances.  In fact, one Riverbed customer is removing Citrix XenApp for one critical application used by hundreds of users at 80 remote sites.  They expect to save $millions over the lifetime of that application, from not having to pay Citrix for annual recurring licensing costs that seem to rise faster than the rate of inflation.

While in the past I've heard of a few Riverbed customers removing Citrix licenses before, I am now starting to see it happen with greater recurring frequency, on a much grander scale.  It seems that WAN optimization has now matured enough as a technology that it can now be trusted for deep-impacting IT initiatives.  At Riverbed, we especially look forward to this new and interesting competitive frontier.

Are all WOCs made alike?

WAN optimization vendors seem to be saying the same things.  They all seem to be making claims of 50X performance improvement.  They all seem to talk about how users can benefit from LAN-like performance.  They all seem to claim that their products facilitate server consolidation and data center elimination.  As a concrete example, below are two graphs taken from marketing materials published by two competing WAN optimization vendors.  The first graph was originally published by Riverbed in 2005.  The second graph is from Blue Coat, and it is dated from 2007.  As you can see, there are some striking similarities in the claims by each vendor.

 

 

The central goal of vendors such as Blue Coat who mimic Riverbed's messaging is to make their products appear to be same as the Riverbed solution.  And by using carefully-controlled testing procedures in isolated lab environments, they often can generate performance results that appear to be Riverbed-like. 

But the fact is that competitive products are very different from the Riverbed Steelhead solution; they were created with very different product architectures, and often were originally designed for entirely different purposes (e.g., web security or file caching).  They also use legacy caching-based or tunneling-based architectures that have been tried many times in the past--with limited success.   In contrast, the Riverbed Steelhead solution uses a unique TCP-proxy approach that is innovative and purpose-built specifically for WAN optimization. 

Differences between Riverbed and competitive products become evident in real-life network environments.  Issues that are never observed in the lab expose themselves when the WOC is subjected to heavy traffic loads and network events that occur in a real-life network.  Typically, these problems are related to scalability issues.  For example in the case of Cisco WAAS and Blue Coat's ProxySG, both products suffer from scaling limitations related to their use of per-peer data stores (see blog Riverbed's Universal Data Store).  This is but one of a number of different scalability issues that commonly surface when the products leave the sheltered environment of the test lab.

Riverbed's competitors would like nothing better than for their prospective customers to limit product evaluations to only simple lab tests, where their scalability issues are not exposed.  To avoid falling into this trap, I would advise the following as part of the evaluation process for any WAN optimization product, to ensure that the scalability of the product is properly investigated:

• Do not limit your evaluation to just simple lab tests.  Always do pilot testing with the actual products in your production network.  Don't accept excuses from the vendor for not providing you with equipment for a limited time to perform the POC testing.
• For large networks, the POC should involve multiple sites, certainly more than two. As much as possible, test an environment where multiple branch offices access data through one core data center device.
• Test a wide variety of different applications that are found in your network, and under heavy traffic loads for both optimized and pass-through traffic.
• Monitor for negative impacts to non-optimized pass-through traffic.  Be aware that many WOCs gain performance benefits by stealing bandwidth from non-optimized traffic.
• Find out if the vendor eats their own dogfood.  Does the vendor use their own WOC product at all locations throughout their internal network environment?  If the vendor can't scale their own product in their own network, then how can you expect to in your network?
• Most importantly, ask the vendor to provide contact information of at least two customers who have deployed the number of WOC devices that you envision for your network, and speak confidentially with those customers about their experiences.  Has the customer realized real $$$ benefit from server and data center consolidation as a result of using the WOC product?

Despite what some vendors would have you believe, the bottom line is that all WOCs are not made alike.  I have met and spoken with a number customers who tragically found this out too late.  Some were distracted by lower prices offered by their originally-selected vendor; others by vendor/brand loyalty.  Each case resulted in many months or years of frustration before Riverbed finally came into the picture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope is not a strategy.  Be prepared.

Stop the Presses! Survey shows that accessing files slows off-site workers

Surveys can be useful, a complete waste of time, or anything in between.  Many surveys are conducted to simply validate an answer to a question that is already known.  Whether the survey is from the Hawaiian visitor's bureau asking visitors if they enjoy the tropical climate to the Jonas Brothers asking if pre-teen girls have a crush on them, surveys that aim to validate an expected and commonly known answer can indeed be a waste of time.

That being said, a recent survey conducted for Riverbed aimed to validate the well known poor experience of off-site workers that access their corporate files and applications while off-site.  While the over-arching answer was as predicted, there were some interesting findings as well.

The survey asked a series of questions of more than 900 U.S. adults aged 18 and up who are employed full time, normally work on-site and have ever accessed business files or software stored on their employer’s server/network/drives from off-site.

The survey found that:

   - 47 percent are working off-site more often now than they were 2 years ago
   - More than half (54%) concentrate better when working off-site compared to being in the office
   - Two-thirds (67%) would like to be able to work off-site more frequently than they currently do

Working “off-site” today means that employees are working remotely from myriad locations, according to the survey:

   - 80 percent have accessed business files or software from home
   - 37 percent have accessed business files or software from a hotel room
   - 27 percent have accessed business files or software from another company office location
   - 20 percent have accessed business files or software from a vacation destination
   - 19 percent have accessed business files or software from an airport
   - 17 percent have accessed business files or software from a business conference
   - 13 percent have accessed business files or software from a Wi-Fi enabled public space such as a park
   - 11 percent have accessed business files or software from a coffee shop.

The survey also found that, among employees who have ever accessed business files or software from a remote location:

   - 29 percent do so at least 5 times per week
   - 33 percent say accessing business files or software remotely negatively affects their productivity
   - 40 percent say they would work off-site more often if their business files or software would load more quickly
   - While waiting for business files or software to load, employees have:
   - checked their personal email (44 percent)
   - gone to the restroom (43 percent)
   - watched TV (41 percent)
   - made a phone call (38 percent)
   - gotten or made themselves a snack (34 percent)
   - day dreamed (26 percent)
   - done household chores (19 percent)
   - paid bills online (15 percent)

I know what you are thinking.  40% of workers would work off-site more often if they didn't have the performance issues definitely validates the application performance problem that off-site employees face, but the results surely are not nearly as high as the 92% of pre-teen girls that have a crush on the Jonas Brothers.

Luckily for the off-site workers, Riverbed's WAN optimization solutions increase performance close to the level as if they were back on-site.  Unfortunately, there is no current solution for the pre-teen crush on the Jonas Brothers.

Riverbed performance hall of fame

"Absolutely amazing and future proof"
"Faster than light.  Accelerated beyond expectations"
"My phone doesn't ring anymore"
"Dude, where's my Terabytes? (12 of them gone this month)"

The above is a sampling of some of our customer quotes tied to the unbelievable performance results that are coming in after launching the Riverbed Performance Hall of Fame contest in our online community a couple of weeks ago.

If you have a few moments, please visit the performance hall of fame area and vote for your favorites.

Leader Recognition for WAN Optimization from Analyst Firm

Riverbed recently received market recognition from leading analyst Gartner where they positioned Riverbed in the leader's quadrant for WAN optimization controllers. 

Gartner also recently issued their new market share report for WAN optimization controllers and Riverbed leads the pack in both WAN optimization market segments with a 31.4% market share in the AP WOC category and a leading 24.2% market share in the WOC category.

While the industry recognition is much appreciated, Riverbed is not taking this for granted as our team of ~1000 individuals at Riverbed continues to work on improving existing products, develop new and exciting technology, and deliver top-notch technical support to our customer base of 6000+.

New Steelhead Mobile Innovations

Riverbed announced a new product and enhancements to Steelhead Mobile yesterday.  We've expanded our offering to allow organizations from small-to-mid-size businesses (SMBs) to the largest global corporations allowing their mobile workforce with LAN-like access to corporate files and applications.

Here's a look at the new features...

Steelhead Mobile Controller Virtual Edition:

The Steelhead Mobile Controller Virtual Edition (SMC-VE) provides enterprise-grade acceleration for SMBs or larger organizations that have a small number of mobile workers interested in implementing strategic deployments of Steelhead Mobile.  SMC-VE is a virtual package deployed on the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), a virtualized platform that provides customers with the capability to run up to five additional services and applications in a protected partition on the Steelhead appliance. By running SMC-VE within the RSP, Riverbed offers enterprises the opportunity to obtain all of the same benefits of Steelhead Mobile while eliminating the need to purchase additional hardware.  Enterprises can purchase as few as 10 initial licenses, up to a total capacity of 100 licenses, to make it easier to cost-effectively target mobile users in environments where the additional scale of the SMC is unnecessary.

Increased Steelhead Mobile Controller Capacity

In addition to reaching smaller organizations with the SMC-VE, Steelhead Mobile 2.1 also extends the reach of the Steelhead Mobile Controller (SMC) appliance by increasing the total license capacity for the largest enterprises.  The SMC is now capable of managing 2x as many licenses as before, for a total 4,000 licenses without any new hardware.

Application Layer Lotus Notes Optimization

Steelhead Mobile now offers application-layer optimization for Lotus Notes for mobile workers, giving Notes users the chance to be productive anywhere. Developed directly with IBM to optimize email, calendaring, and web, Steelhead Mobile provides performance gains of 18x or more for Lotus Notes.  Together with the Lotus Notes application layer acceleration introduced in RiOS 5.5, Riverbed is the only vendor with a complete Lotus Notes acceleration solution for both mobile and remote office workers.

The security, speed, and simplicity of Steelhead Mobile further extend the benefits of Riverbed optimization and acceleration leadership to the mobile worker for organizations of any size. Use these great new features to enable improve application performance, and minimize management overhead.

<http://www.riverbed.com/company/news/press_releases/press_072009.php>

Eating our own dogfood, part 2

In my previous blog, I raised a few questions about Cisco's internal use of their WAAS product.  While I never doubted that Cisco has some WAAS devices deployed in their internal network, I did ask important questions about whether internally, Cisco is truly using and embracing WAAS to the same extent that they want their largest customers to.  Larry Chaffin echoed my questions in his Network World blog:

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/42889

Subsequent to the discussions on Larry's blog, Feng Meng provided a few vague pieces of information about Cisco's internal use of WAAS in his Cisco blog:

http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/comments/wan_optimization_and_application_acceleration_case_study_-_cisco/

From the few tidbits of information Feng has offered, there are few things we can now conclude about WAAS:

1)  While Cisco aggressively encourages their customers to deploy WAAS to hundreds of sites, Cisco internally has yet to deploy it internally at such scale.

2)  While Cisco is a US-based company, they have yet to deploy WAAS in their domestic locations where the majority of their employees are located.

3)  The scale and scope of Cisco's WAAS pilot remains unclear, as Feng gave no details as to how many employees actually used WAAS in the pilot.  Caution is in order, as conveniently left-out details can be used to lead readers to inaccurate conclusions.

4)  Since Feng complained that Cisco has almost 10,000 servers, it seems Cisco is burdened with the same "server-sprawl" issues that are typical of other large enterprises.  But WAAS apparently has not allowed Cisco to consolidate servers and eliminate data centers as Riverbed's similarly-large enterprise customers have been able to do.  Indeed, the number of servers in Cisco's IT infrastructure appears not to have changed from the 9360 that existed before WAAS, as documented in Cisco's WAAS case study from June 2008.

As Feng lamented, I can understand how WAAS has been prioritized below other projects such as Telepresence by the internal Cisco IT team.  As a former IT manager myself, I certainly would have done the same thing.  But IT organizations that do not report to Cisco have the option to consider Riverbed.  Unlike WAAS, Riverbed has been deployed to the largest IP networks in the world--including networks that are much larger than Cisco's internal network.  And also unlike WAAS, the Riverbed solution has a track record of consistently delivering positive ROI--often within a period of a few months--for networks of all sizes.  Many IT organizations would readily place a project like that at the highest priority.

SharePoint - Made for the WAN?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eating our own dogfood

In 1988 an email was circulated internally within Microsoft about the importance of “Eating our own Dogfood.”  Usage of the phrase spread not only within Microsoft, but throughout the high-tech industry, where the phrase is commonly used to communicate an important principle.  The principle basically states that any vendor who expects customers to use their products should also be using these products internally, in their own internal IT infrastructure.

 

As with most other companies in the high-tech industry, Riverbed practices the principle of “Eating our own Dogfood.”  With about 1000 employees, Riverbed is a medium-sized company with about 30 office locations around the world.  Every one of those locations have a Steelhead appliance for optimizing WAN connectivity, and every Riverbed employee has a Steelhead mobile software client installed and in use on their laptop or workstation.

 

However, when it comes to WAAS, Cisco seems to believe the dogfood principle does not apply.  Cisco touts WAAS as a scalable enterprise solution that can be deployed to hundreds of sites.  But they have so far failed to show that they have deployed it at such scale in their own internal enterprise.  Although Cisco believes WAAS is good for their customers, apparently they've been unable to demonstrate how WAAS provides value for their own internal employees.

 

Any customer considering a significant investment in WAAS should ask Cisco these questions.  How many WAAS devices have been deployed in Cisco's own internal IT network?  Does Cisco have their own operational WAAS deployment that is at least as large as the one that they would propose for your network?

Faster than a speeding rollout

Well folks,

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

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

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

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

Extending data security to Riverbed appliances

David Spark reporting for Riverbed at Interop '09, Las Vegas, NV.

Last night I had dinner with Ray Kruck from Websense, an essential information protection company with solutions to protect Web, e-mail, and data security needs. During dinner he told me all about his days as a car salesman for Hummer in Toronto, Canada. While amusing, I was more interested in the announcement they just made with Riverbed which was the announced extension of their security solutions, SAAS and on-premise Web filtering and Web security platforms, to Riverbed appliances.

We talked about that, plus their new acquistion, Defensio, which stops splogs (spam blogs) from stealing your Web traffic.

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

 

The data center is more than the fabric that connects servers

David Spark reporting for Riverbed at Interop '09, Las Vegas, NV.

I chatted with Mark Day, Chief Scientist of Riverbed who spoke on this morning's keynote panel, "Reinventing the data center." There was a series of agreements and dissent on the panel around this subject. Together, Day said they all agreed that the highest ROI thing you could do would be to consolidate the data center. Doing so delivers a multitude of savings, such as savings on power, licenses, and server maintenance.

Day was hoping that the conversation expanded to issues of how the changes in technology like cloud computing and storage duplication and WAN optimization affect the data center. They focused on the narrow issue of the fabric of one data center. You need to think about it more holistically.

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

 

Networking challenges: Ideas and opinions from Interop Unconference

David Spark reporting for Riverbed at Interop '09, Las Vegas, NV.

If you've never been to an unconference, here's the format - there is no format. Or rather, it's a very loose format. The one I sat in was entitled, "Let's talk about networks, WANs, and CDNs." So it turns into a giant geek rap session based on different topics.

The following are just some ideas and comments that came out of this discussion at the Interop '09 unconference:

• When asking, "Where should you invest in your network first," you need to first ask yourself "What applications are you delivering over that network? What are the demands they have that you need?"
• For one person's client, each department has its own budget for IT and they need to justify their own applications when they make requests to IT.
  
• Another person responded that he tested this budget flow with mobile devices. Whenever new cool smart phones came out, people always wanted one which became a budget and management nightmare. Now, people have to come with their own budget if they want a cool new phone.
  
• CFOs are becoming aggressively more involved in the IT budget discussion.
  
• Most people don't split their costs up across all the businesses.
• One woman didn't believe Interop's recent survey of 1,000 people that said 40% of companies are increasing spending. She did an informal survey of the group of 20 and none of us were increasing spending.
• Before you offer the service to your client (e.g. hosted VoIP), try it yourself for your own business so you have real world experience.
• The build it yourself or go for a hosted networking solution decision is based mostly on what expertise you have in house.
• One guy who has a series of Web application clients, spoke for them as a loose proxy. He noticed in repeat cases that when they were small they outsourced everything to keep costs down. But as they started growing rapidly, the outsourcing company couldn't keep up with their growing business demands. So they brought everything in house to their own data center.
• Seeing a shift from CapEx to OpEx.

 

Mobile WAN optimization: It isn't just about employees who travel

David Spark reporting for Riverbed at Interop '09, Las Vegas, NV.

Just yesterday I learned about the category of mobile WAN optimization. I didn't even know it existed. So Joe Ghory, product marketing manager for mobile products for Riverbed and I discussed the fact that mobile WAN optimization isn't on most people's radar. Many people may not consider it because they may think it's only for employees who travel. But really it's for employees that work in small groups (e.g. satellite offices with less than five employees) or SOHO employees.

Another issue we discussed is that when you're trying to manage data with mobile workers you don't have much control of the bandwidth they're using. With mobile WAN optimization, you can optimize what little you've got.

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

 

The most common tech support question at Riverbed

David Spark reporting for Riverbed at Interop '09, Las Vegas, NV.

In just a couple of days, Riverbed will be hitting its seventh year anniversary. Steve Smoot, VP of technical operations, who was one of the first dozen employees. He's been around all those eight years. I asked Smoot what WAN optimization was like eight years ago and how it's evolved to today. Back then, Smoot was evangelizing the issue of latency is affecting your business operations. Today, people have finally figured that out and that's why there's such a big market for WAN optimization.

And since he deals with customer support issues, I asked him what was the most common support issue he has to answer. You'll be amused at the answer. It's a simple mistake a lot of us make.

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