The Riverbed Blog

The old ideas are still the best

It often seems that there are few really new ideas in computers. There are many, many interesting technologies, novel approaches, and effective products -- but when examined closer, most are old ideas in a few form.

Take CPU architecture. The very first CPUs were RISC-type machines, but were severely-limited by the technology available. Limited RAM, and slow access times, meant it was advantageous to perform as much work as possible without accessing RAM. So we got CISC architecture. But as hardware improved, RISC architectures came to the fore again. It seemed new to many engineers, but was simply an idea whose time had come.

Another example is Cloud Computing. Often mistaken as a new idea, of course it's actually a very old idea. 1950s science fiction is replete with visions of centralized computing. Take Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451, a dystopian novel about the future. It features a centralized, interactive, video distribution system (admittedly used to distract the populace, and keep it content!).

So while Cloud Computing is an old idea -- as are the problems of insufficient bandwitdh and high latencies that go with it -- Riverbed has new solutions for these problems. The Riverbed Cloud Steelhead allows enterprises to overcome these problems, giving end-users LAN-like performance access to services and data located in the Cloud.  The Whitewater Cloud Storage Gateway allows you to eliminate dependence on unreliable, error-prone tape systems for backup and DR Eliminate tape and enjoy the benefits of cloud backup with a Whitewater cloud storage gateway.

It often seems to me that if one wants to learn the best technical approaches, one needs to look back, not forward. History is full of ideas which are just waiting for engineering ability to catch up. And Riverbed's engineers have now caught up and are helping those visions become a reality, allowing enterprises to deliver services to their end-users, in an efficient and secure manner.

Join Riverbed at AFCEA West 2012

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

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

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

 

The Top Blog of 2011 -- RiOS 7.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Congratulations to Riverbed's Worldwide Distributor of the Year: ArrowECS

Congratulations to Riverbed Global Partner of the Year: Orange Business Services

2011 was a great year for Riverbed and as everyone knows - our partners play a huge role in our growth and success each year. This year, although the competition was tough, as we had many partners with outstanding performances - one partner gave an absolutely top-notch performance this year.   A partner since 2005,  this partner truly is global with one of the world’s largest networks that reaches over 220 countries and territories. They partner with Riverbed with a managed service offer and they are also a Riverbed Authorized Support Partner since 2010.  If any partner had a “License to Succeed” this year –  it is this year winner of the Global Partner of the Year award.

It is with great pleasure that I present the Global Partner of the Year award to Orange Business Services.

 

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

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

the Riverbed Blog. 

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

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

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

 

Riverbed, Five Years On

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

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

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

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

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

The Top Ten Blogs of 2011: #3 -- We'll Hang With You

One of the best blogs of 2011 came from one of our guest bloggers back on September 19.  Kary Rogers, a member of Riverbed's award-winning Support team, shared a really interesting and cool story about how he helped a customer work through a particularly thorny support issue. This is the sort of thing that Riverbed Support people do every day.

As Kary says:

One of Riverbed Support's tenets is that we don't pass the buck or point fingers; we endeavor to be a good partner with everyone. If in the course of troubleshooting, the root cause appears to be another device in your network, we'll help to troubleshoot the issue as best we can and stay with you until the issue is resolved.

Check out this fine blog post.

The Top Ten Blogs of 2011: #4 -- Distributed recentralization

Steve Riley was one of our most prolific bloggers of 2011.  Since September, he's been writing an article just about every other week.  He even received an award for being one of the 100 best Cloud Bloggers in the Blogosphere. 

His favorite blog article this year was one that he wrote back in April, entitled "Distributed recentralization: Networks to eleven!"  This article was about the interesting connections between cloud computing and user-centric IT. 

Basically, it's a fairly typical article from Steve: smart, clever, with many interesting allusions, and a cool writing style.  But he really drills down and makes some important and cogent points in this one, and so we've chosen it as our 4th best blog article of 2011.

The Top Ten Blogs of 2011: #5 -- The Great Blog Battle

Number 5 takes us back to earlier this month (December 16), when we ran two blog articles on the same day, each taking a different perspective on the cloud. 

In the first, Nik Rouda wrote about the Public Cloud, where he discussed the kind of projects and work taken on by IT staff when the cloud is public vs private, migration issues, performance issues, and what he sees as the strengths of Public Cloud vs Private Cloud.

In the second piece, Dormain Drewitz takes an opposite view, espousing the strengths and value of the Private Cloud, the challenge of migrating to a Public Cloud, and the strengths of Private Cloud over Public.

We're still interested in your opinions on this important issue, so feel free to add your comments beneath this post, or either of the two from December 16.

The Top Ten Blogs of 2011: #6 -- Humor

Every now and then during 2011, some humor snuck into the blog.  When you have as many clever and creative people as we have at Riverbed, that's almost unavoidable.

The first of these appeared on a Friday back in April, when the first poem in the history of our blog ran.  It was called Jabberwiki, and was composed by Nik Rouda, Director of Solutions Marketing here at Riverbed.

On July 12, Yoav Eilat wrote "The Secret Connection Between Vacuum Cleaners and Riverbed Cascade," a very funny and accurate look at the similarities in product names between Cascade and various vacuum cleaners.

And on August 17, we ran a short video that was produced by a group of Riverbed summer interns, called Bad Interns that received quite a lot of feedback.  You can see it for yourself right here:

 

The Top Ten Blogs of 2011: #7 -- The Packet Capture Innovators

As you may know by now, the three guys who effectively created the part of network analysis called Packet Capture all work for Riverbed.

• Steve McCanne, who wrote TCPDUMP is a founder of Riverbed, and today serves as our CTO.
• Gerald Combs, creator of Wireshark, is our Director of Open Source Projects
• Loris Degioanni, who wrote WinPCap was the co-founder of CACE Technology, who we acquired in 2010.

The three of them appeared on stage together for the first time at the 2011 Riverbed Sales Kickoff in January, and we blogged about it with a video:

 

And then, on May 23, we conducted a Twitter party where we told the story of how they developed their respective products, and later we published the entire set of tweets in a single (rather long) blog post that ran on May 31.

The Top Ten Blogs of 2011: #8 -- Riverbed 101 Video

On October 19, Bob Gilbert posted a video that is a marvelous introduction to all the things that Riverbed does.  It has received such an overwhelming response that it's made it as the #8 blog posting of 2011.  We've even saved you the trouble of clicking a link to go find it.  Here it is:

 

The Top Ten Blogs of 2011: #9 -- Stingray Acquisition and Introduction

On July 19, Riverbed announced our acquisition of both Zeus Technology and Aptimize Technology.  We made the announcement in a special blog post that afternoon, but then we stayed quiet on the topic for awhile. 

On October 25, we announced our new Stingray Traffic Manager v8.0 in a video blog presented by Apurva Dave, our Marketing VP for Stingray Products, and then on October 26, we posted an article that discussed many of the features of the new release, and in the days and weeks that have followed there has been a tremendous amount of information posted on our blog about Stingray Traffic Manager, including a multi-part series (that we'll continue in 2012) that introduces specific features in brief videos:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Performance Monitoring
• Part 3: Global Load Balancing
• Part 4: Global View
• Part 5: Flexible Deployment
• Part 6: Ultimate Control
• Part 7: High Availability

And as part of the integration into Riverbed, we brought over the old Zeus blog and gave it its own area on our blog site.  We also took the other Zeus social media articles, and incorporated them into our Community site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While Cascade 9.0 brought tremendous maturity to Cascade through:

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

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

Riverbed Connect Podcast #48: Advanced QoS

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

 

 

 

Riverbed Storytellers Contest winner for September

As we promised, we are catching up on announcing our Storytellers winners.  Today we'll fill you in on our September winner, Jim Helmly from Washington DC.  Jim designs network field sites for his organization.

Jim has over 1200 Steelhead appliances, and has had for over three years.  Needless to say, he has become the Riverbed expert in his organization.  They use the Steelheads to optimize a variety of applications, including HTTP, MAPI, CIFS, as well as some of their homegrown applications. 

His Storytellers article, Riverbed Helps Field Sites, But Saves Data Centers, discusses how their Steelhead appliances "provide an enormous benefit to the data centers accessed by the remote sites. If it were not for our Riverbed appliances, our legacy data center would have been overtaxed by the growth in the network sites and traffic."

His graphical results (shown at left) reflect a better than 80% reduction in bandwidth, and a corresponding increase in bandwidth capacity of better than 5x. 

 

Performance: very important. Integrity: even more.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine was asking some questions about what kinds of risks WAN optimization might pose for data integrity. He was sufficiently skeptical that he established a policy prohibiting any form of WAN optimization on his network. I said I thought that was a little extreme; have you performed any in-house testing to learn how, for example, RiOS strives to maintain integrity? As I thought, he hadn't.

A couple weeks later I found myself in a similar situation: another person questioning the ability to preserve data integrity when WAN optimizers are in the path of the traffic. Sensing a pattern, I'm thinking it's time to address this topic.

Suppose ClientA and ServerB need to communicate with each other. Network equipment between ClientA and ServerB should do everything it can to ensure that the payloads exiting one node are the same as the payloads entering the other node. Sounds simple, right? If most network gear is simply reading datagram headers, making a few changes to a value or two along the way, but not touching the payload, few people worry about data integrity. But when the network equipment actually examines and modifies the payload, well, that can make some people uncomfortable.

RiOS takes several precautions to ensure that the original goal -- traffic out equals traffic in -- is maintained. First, whenever ClientA connects to ServerB, the connection is always permitted: the Steelheads on both sides allow the full connection, even if ClientA has previously connected to ServerB. By not using tunnels or multiplexing, RiOS maintains a one-to-one ratio of active connections between Steelheads and the corresponding connections between clients and servers. A Steelhead doesn't attempt to spoof, or assume the identity of, a client or a server.

Second, RiOS continually validates the integrity and format of its data dictionary. Scalable Data Referencing, the feature that does most of the deduplication work, relies principally on byte-by-byte comparisons to ensure that the same symbolic reference always matches the same unique data chunk. When "cold" Steelheads exchange data chunks, the chunks are encoded with checksums; the checksums are compared after transmission to check for data corruption. This combination is an improvement over hashing mechanisms that run the risk of occasionally colliding. Further, if the Steelhead on one side receives a reference it no longer understands, or can't reliably reconstruct (because of a checksum mismatch, for example), it will re-request the entire chunk from the Steelhead on the other side.

Third, RiOS doesn't assume that its data dictionary is always current. Returning to our example, suppose ClientA retrieves a file from ServerB. The Steelheads on both ends construct their respective data dictionaries. Now ClientC, in the same branch office as ClientA, retrieves the file. The wrong way to optimize this is for the client-side WAN optimizer to spoof ServerB and immediately return the content. RiOS takes care of this the right way: ClientC's connection is forwarded all the way to ServerB, ServerB returns the file, and the server-side Steelhead evaluates the return traffic patterns. Only if they exactly match the patterns already stored in the dictionary will the Steelhead send the references to the client-side Steelhead, which then returns the corresponding full data chunks to the client.

If you're a long-time Riverbed customer, you probably already understand how SDR and RiOS preserve data integrity. If you're new to Riverbed, or are just looking to learn more, I hope this brief introduction has been useful. We freely admit: we are speed freaks here. But we won't let our passion for performance override our obsession with integrity. So let's go -- fast, and with trust.

Blog Battle: Why public cloud is the future of IT

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

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

Let the Blog Battle begin!

Why public cloud is the future of IT

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog Battle: Why mastering the private cloud should be your top priority

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

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

Let the Blog Battle begin!

I hereby proclaim that the private cloud should take precedence in your hearts and minds, winning the favor of your attention and mastery!

Why? You will always have infrastructure. Unless you are a very small company that plans on staying a very small company, the chances that you will continue to have some amount of infrastructure to purchase and manage is extremely high.

Reason 1- Cost: The economics of running certain applications in the public cloud just don’t make sense (yet). Pay-by-the-hour, infinitely scalable, public cloud resources are great for certain types of applications. A huge batch job of analytics processing? Why overbuy when you can rent! A seasonal promotion? Perfect for deploying in the cloud that can support spiky workloads! But your day-to-day, predictable workloads? When you add up the service costs for month after month of cloud service fees and weigh that against the declining cost of most hardware… well sometimes it’s better to own (and get the depreciation benefit) than to rent.

Reason 2 – Human resources: To fully take advantage of cloud scalability, you have to do some rewiring of the application… and sometimes the person who wrote that application is long gone. So until you decommission the application, or decide it’s worth it to pay consultants to dig into the code, that app is staying put.

So if you’re going to have some applications remaining on premise, why not maximize the efficiency of your infrastructure by adopting private cloud practices and technologies? There’s a ton of benefit to gain from virtualizing applications and running them on consolidated infrastructure in a highly automated data center. Here are some examples:

1. You’re going to need to have a clear picture of what applications you have and how they are connected before making changes like migrating servers between locations and consolidating them into virtualized data centers. Application-aware network performance management, like Riverbed Cascade, can rapidly build application dependency maps to give you visibility into multi-tier applications. There are ongoing benefits as well, such as rapid troubleshooting capabilities from having an integrated tool for analyzing enterprise-wide flow data and drilling down into specific packets.
2. You’ll need to actually move those applications to your virtualized data center without disrupting service availability. Global load-balancing capabilities in the Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager can allow you to rewire applications in the background while maintaining service availability.  Your private cloud will also benefit from the automation that Stingray provides in increasing application performance and reliability, and support greater server throughput for further consolidation potential.  As a virtual appliance, you can easily right-size your Stingray deployment, while taking full advantage of your virtualized infrastructure.
3. Finally, you’ll need to make sure users can still access applications running in your private cloud data center… which is probably a greater distance from your end users than local servers and data centers were before. Riverbed’s Steelhead WAN optimization technology minimizes the impact of latency – something that adding bandwidth capacity alone cannot do – so that end-users in branch offices and on mobile laptops can continue to use applications as if they were local.  As an added benefit, Steelhead appliances and mobile software can reduce bandwidth consumption by 65-95%, providing efficiency and savings that can be funneled back into the business.

So, not to rain on the whole public cloud parade, but the big party is happening over in private cloud-land. And you’re invited.

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

Autodesk University 2011 recap

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

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

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

 

 

Windows Azure Optimized for Performance

Microsoft and Riverbed are holding a special seminar event today in Mountain View, CA and the theme is maximizing productivity with Windows Azure and Riverbed.  Today's cloud discussion will focus on the cloud storage component of Azure and the tremendous value that comes with leveraging a rent vs. buy model for enterprise storage.

Riverbed's Whitewater cloud storage gateway family of products will also be the focus of the discussion and specifically how Whitewater addresses 3 key questions that IT professionals have when it comes to cloud storage:  Can I use my existing backup platform such as Backup Exec, NetBackup, or Tivoli Storage Manager?  Can I meet my backup and restore windows now that I am going over a WAN instead of a LAN? How can I be ensured that the data I am transferring and storing in the cloud is secure?

I am looking forward to the discussion and teaming with Microsoft to deliver cloud storage that is simple to deploy, optimized, and secure.  If you are in the area and interested in attending, please rsvp here.

RiOS 7.0: A closer look at HTTP Stream Splitting

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

 

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

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

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

Slow… SharePoint? Stingray Aptimizer to the Rescue!

Jessica Safiari, Riverbed PR specialist, recently had a creative bug spurred by a triple shot of the recent SharePoint Conference, our Stingray announcement, and possibly from watching too many reruns of Superman films. Either way, enjoy the below short story.   

At the end of the annual Microsoft SharePoint conference, bloggers and journalists came away with the idea of ‘transition’ for the Web-based application. Regardless of the SharePoint changes to come, organizations need to accelerate the application now.

Picture this… It’s a dark, lonely night at the office, and Steve Hairpoint is working late to prepare for the biggest sales meeting of his career. “One more piece of competitive analysis data and I’m calling it a night,” he thought as he logged onto SharePoint. His keystrokes echo in the silent building. He waits for the application to open. The clock ticks slowly. One minute… Two minutes… And then finally, it loads. Tired and frustrated, Steve continues his work. After another half-hour of painfully slow searches for the information he needs, Steve called it quits.

We’ve all been there: working hard on a project and the Web-based application is not cooperating.  When people are forced to wait, the loss of time can be detrimental to potential business opportunities. And in this challenging economy, every opportunity could make or break the organization’s bottom line. Additionally, it is frustrating and impacts user behavior. We invest in these awesome Web-based applications; and sometimes they choke like someone is asking their secret crush on a first date, becoming almost unusable and in a sense reducing employee productivity. 

Luckily, Web-based applications, like SharePoint, now have a superhero to rescue them from the twin perils of heavy weight inefficient content and network limitations like latency. The name is Riverbed Stingray Aptimizer for SharePoint. If Stingray Aptimizer had its own television series, the intro would be:

Stingray Aptimizer laughs in the face of latency as he sits on the web server, boldly accelerating applications and websites, freeing all Web-based applications, like SharePoint from lag time. With Stingray Aptimizer, SharePoint and intranet response times are lightning fast. How can Stingray Aptimizer accomplish such a great feat? The amazing powers of Stingray Aptimizer reduces page load times, reducing bandwidth by instantly transforming the Website content (images, scripts, style sheets, etc.) to create fewer long distance round trips, giving Web-based applications and intranets the defense they need against the evil forces of latency. Our superhero is committed to freeing organizations everywhere of application delays, so they can take on the world and fearlessly pursue business opportunities!

Announcing RiOS 7.0: Loves ALL traffic (TCPv4, UDP and TCPv6...)

Today's guest blogger is Chiara Regale, Director of Product Management for our Steelhead Appliances.

As the true market leader in the WAN optimization space, Riverbed continues to innovate with the release of RiOS 7.0 software.

Besides all the new features you can read in Monday's blog article, RiOS 7.0 introduces a new optimization framework called Packet Mode Optimization.

As the name infers, Packet Mode is a packet-by-packet optimization that allows intercepting, processing packets and applying Scalable Data Referencing (SDR) mechanism to UDP and TCP IPv6 flows. The end result is the drastic bandwidth reduction of UDP and IPv6 data.

When enabled to optimize UDP, Packet Mode can accelerate a variety of applications, such as disaster recovery (Aspera and Veritas Volume Replicator, for instance), fast file transfer (TFTP), and Windows PE for remote PC boot, among others.

When enabled to optimize TCP IPv6 connections, Packet Mode enables data reduction in those networks with stringent IPv6 migration requirements (Federal space, Service Providers and Large enterprises).

Just to provide few more details on the new optimization framework, here is a pictorial representation to explain how Packet Mode Optimization works.

Once the UDP or IPv6 packet is intercepted, a tunnel is automatically built to the remote Steelhead.  After applying SDR, the intercepted UDP or IPv6 traffic will be sent to the remote Steelhead over this tunnel.   At the receiving end the remote Steelhead will de-encapsulate the traffic, rebuild the original data stream and forward the traffic to the destination in the original traffic encapsulation. 

With Packet Mode Optimization, we can now say that Steelheads and RiOS love all traffic.

You can learn more about Packet Mode Optimization from the following podcast video:

 

Announcing RiOS 7.0: Batteries Not Included

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

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

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

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

Announcing RiOS 7.0: On-Demand Packet Capture & Analysis in Steelheads!

Bob Gilbert and Dimitri Vlachos discuss packet capture & analysis, which is a major feature enhancement that comes as part of the RiOS 7.0 software update to Riverbed's Steelhead appliance WAN optimization product.

 

 

Announcing RiOS 7.0: Steelhead's new new best friend - Cascade Pilot

It’s common knowledge that pilot fish and sharks have a symbiotic relationship. Pilot fish follow sharks on their oceanic wanderings, cleaning them of parasites and feeding off their leftovers.

The new RiOS 7.0 release adds Embedded Cascade Shark functionality into Steelhead xx50 appliances running RiOS 7.0. Steelhead products have always had the ability to perform on-demand packet captures using the built-in tcpdump feature, but now the Embedded Cascade Shark feature lets you manage and analyze trace files directly on remote Steelhead devices using the Cascade Pilot packet analysis console.

The significance of this is three-fold:

First, it’s extremely cost effective. It means that when you are experiencing WAN trouble at a remote branch office without on-site IT staff, you don’t have to fly a technician or equipment to the site to troubleshoot the problem. You simply log onto Cascade Pilot’s web interface and remotely enable, schedule and manage your packet capture jobs and analyze your problems away – assuming you have the proper permission, of course.

Oh yeah, it’s a lot cheaper since Embedded Shark Functionality is included at no extra charge with Steelhead xx50 appliances! This means you don’t need to install dedicated hardware probes all over the network and you also avoid having to worry about all the extra wiring, cooling and power requirements and costs that would entail.

Secondly, it’s faster. Most likely, you will have diagnosed the problem, resolved the issue, and moved onto another more strategic project in the time it would take a technician to simply get through airport security!

Thirdly, it’s better for your network health.  Since Cascade Pilot analyzes trace files directly on the remote Steelhead appliance, you no longer have to move large files over the network, potentially making an already bad situation worse.

Cascade Pilot lets you quickly open multi-terabyte capture files and easily analyze them using its intuitive, graphical user interface. It helps find the traffic you want fast (seriously, really fast) using an extensive collection of easy-to-use network analysis views. Then, and only then, when you’ve narrowed the scope of the problem to the essential packets, with one click you can send only those packets over the network to Wireshark, the leading open source protocol analyzer, for decoding.

So my advice to any Steelhead customer is that even if you don’t use the complete Cascade solution, make sure you purchase at least one copy of Cascade Pilot to take advantage of the rich troubleshooting information you can glean from your Steelhead appliances. Click here to sign up for your FREE 30-day trail of Cascade Pilot.

For more information on Embedded Cascade Shark, check out this informative video interview with Dimitri Vlachos, senior director of marketing for Cascade.

Announcing RiOS 7.0: Video Optimization Podcast

Bob Gilbert and Deepak Balakrishna discuss video optimization, which is a major feature enhancement that comes as part of the RiOS 7.0 software update to Riverbed's Steelhead appliance WAN optimization product.

 

 

Announcing RiOS 7.0: Video Optimization

Bob Gilbert demonstrates HTTP Stream Splitting, which is one of the video optimizations that is part of the RiOS 7.0 update to Riverbed's Steelhead appliance.

 

 

Announcing RiOS 7.0: Live video stream splitting over HTTP

"I want my MTV," sang Sting on Dire Straits 1985 hit "Money for Nothing".  Replace "MTV" with "video" and that's essentially what enterprises are demanding on their corporate networks today. Video has become a critical tool for corporate communications over the last few years, and this usage is only increasing. What's also interesting here is that HTTP is becoming a standard for video delivery and distribution.

While HTTP is a great protocol to deliver video over, the challenge is that video by its very nature is very bandwidth intensive. If you consider live streaming events such as a CEO's address that all users are required to attend, a tremendous amount of stress is placed on the network.

Riverbed has innovated to solve this challenge in RiOS 7.0 by introducing native stream splitting capability for live video over HTTP. This applies to Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight formats. In fact, stream splitting for Microsoft Silverlight is another industry first for Riverbed.

Another key element of RiOS 7.0 is improvements in pre-positioning of content, including video content, via the CIFS and HTTP pre-population features. This helps administrators stage content to remote branches during off-peak hours, to avoid the surge of traffic from users eager to consume this content when they come in to the office.

Of course, Riverbed's traditional value prop of reducing all other application traffic to make room for video on WAN links, as well as latency-aware quality of service, continues to apply.  But our new native stream splitting really enables customers to get even more out of their investment in Riverbed.

As a bonus, Sting gets his MTV (delivered over HTTP using Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash of course).

Announcing RiOS 7.0: We love ALL traffic!

Following is a podcast from Director of Marketing Bob Gilbert, and Chiara Regale, Director of Product Management.  They'll be discussing RiOS 7's new Packet Optimization Mode feature, which enables Steelheads to optimize many more kinds of traffic than before, including UDP & IPv6. 

 

Announcing RiOS 7.0: Accelerating the Satellites

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcing RiOS 7.0: Riverbed Connect Podcast

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

 

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

Announcing RiOS 7.0: A Little Something for Everyone

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

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

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

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

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

New Features Optimize Applications Customers Care About Most

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riverbed Steelhead & Whitewater Customers Featured at Gartner Conference

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

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

Here’s a bit more information:

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

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

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

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

August Storytellers Contest Winner

As we acknowledged a couple of weeks ago, we fell woefully behind in recognizing our monthly Storytellers Contest Winners, and we promised that we'd fix it.  Here is the next one. 

The winner of the August Storytellers contest is Greg Moore, the IT Director for SRG Partnership, an architectural firm based in Portland, OR that focuses on sustainable strategies.  Greg describes his job as running the gamut from Network Administrator to Help Desk Tech to Business Strategist, which includes setting strategy for SRG's technology initiatives.

SRG only has three Steelhead appliances, located in their three offices (Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco), but they are tremendously valuable to the organization.  They use them to accelerate very slow bandwidth between our sites, enabling file server access, web-based Digital Asset Management, Deltek Vision ERP, multi-site Exchange 2010, Remote Desktop, DFS sync, AutoCAD, Revit and Indesign.

The result is that they are able to collaborate between offices using a variety of digital content development tools that otherwise require LAN performance. As Greg says, "The Steelheads enable us to avoid deploying expensive Exchange infrastructure in our SFO location where we have just a handful of users, all of whom are creative workers exchanging very large emails. We have been able to keep our costs down on expensive bandwidth since all of our offices are in facilities with no planned fiber access due to building age and lightrail adjacency."

They only have 3MB connections between their offices, but they push an "an easy 10GB" of data across the links just about every day.

You can read the whole award-winning story in our Community at No bandwidth here? No problem!

And while you're there, you can look at other stories, vote on the ones that you like best, and maybe even enter your own story. Who knows?  You could win next month!

A nice video that introduces Riverbed

 

What is this Stingray Traffic Manager, anyway? Part 7: High Availability

Stingray Developer Alex Gosse discusses some of the High Availability features found in Stingray Traffic Manager.  If you lose sites, servers, or other critical services, Stingray Traffic Manager can help your web presence keep right on going.

 

Request Rate Shaping – applying limits with fine-grained control

Setting the scene

Imagine you’re part of a team that oversees and manages the web applications in support of a website and service. At certain times of the year, the website and service experiences an overload of visitors looking for information or wishing to purchase products or services.

Unfortunately at this point a huge volume of requests start building up which have a detrimental effect on the performance of the website and service a visitor experiences. The response times for requests become unacceptably slow and visitors get frustrated.

This situation can be made worse if you have limited scalability in the back-end infrastructure, which cannot be scaled up to meet these demands. At this point you may wish to restrict the rate at which requests are received by the back-end servers and applications.

Applying limits with fine grained control

Allow me to suggest an approach that might help you to limit these requests in an elegant way.

One approach would be to measure the performance of the infrastructure and services with Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager's Service Level Monitoring. If Service Level Monitoring indicates that the service's response time rises above a certain threshold, that's a strong indicator that the infrastructure performance level has dropped. Taking action at this point is all very well, but how do you know which type of users of the service to apply this to?  So, before any action is taken, you need to classify the users of the service in some way as to differentiate between them. You will then be able to decide which users of the service you would want to rate limit. Because of the unique way that Stingray Traffic Manager inspects client requests you will be able to determine the location, content or frequency of the request and then classify the user accordingly.

So, you might wish to classify those visitors that are simply browsing the site and are not actively purchasing products or services, e.g. they don’t have anything in their ‘shopping cart’, as low priority during periods when the infrastructure is under strain.

Once you have decided on when to apply a rate-shaping class and which users it will affect, next you apply the rate shaping class. So, when the service and infrastructure starts to become overloaded you would limit the users in the class to a particular level of service. The result of this action is that ‘high priority’ users of the service – those actively engaged in the ‘shopping cart’ process will continue to receive the same high quality of service despite the infrastructure being overloaded.

This is just one example of how Riverbed's request rate shaping might be applied in a real world situation. See Tickets, a current Riverbed customer, is an example of how request rate shaping and Trafficscript has been used to ensure its website is always online and fast, even during extreme-peaks in traffic, so valued customers receive an excellent online service. Read the full case study.

If you who would like to get a more detailed insight into our request rate shaping capabilities, the following white paper will be of interest: Traffic Valuation and Prioritization with Stingray Traffic Manager.

Image sources: Systrax, funk:tion

What is this Stingray Traffic Manager, anyway? Part 6: Ultimate Control

The Riverbed Blog will be taking a couple of days off to enjoy turkey with its family.  The blog will return on Monday, November 28.  Happy Thanksgiving to all of our US-based friends and colleagues, and to anyone else who celebrates.

Developer Alex Gosse demonstrates the flexibility of some of the Stingray Traffic Manager features. He shows how you can modify application traffic as it moves through, through rules management.

 

What is this Stingray Traffic Manager, anyway? Part 5: Deployment

In today's video, Owen looks at the variety of ways that Stingray Traffic Manager can be deployed, and how easy that deployment is.

 

On the importance of secure software layers

Writing high quality software is difficult. Writing secure high quality software is even more difficult. Perhaps because software is still a relatively young discipline, certain aspects present real challenges:

• Its specification languages allow for a broader interpretation of procedures and tasks
• Its product attracts a disproportionate number of attackers
• Its behavior is difficult to predict when its environment or use patterns extend beyond design assumptions

Let's compare software engineering to civil engineering. Humans have been building bridges for a few thousand years. If you follow the specifications for building a bridge, what do you get? Why, a bridge, of course. No tiny unsuspected houses emerge hanging from one side, for example.

How many rivets are in the Golden Gate Bridge? (Answer.) If you selected two dozen at random and removed them, would the bridge spectacularly collapse into the San Francisco Bay? Of course not. Aside from a few notable failures, bridges are well-understood constructions. We can predict how a bridge will behave according to its specifications, we can predict how a damaged bridge will behave in the face of local failures, and we can predict how a deteriorating bridge will continue to function before certain repairs are required.

How many lines of code are in Debian 5.0? (Answer.) If you randomly commented two dozen lines and recompiled the code, can you predict how it would behave? Not a chance. It might run for days, weeks, even years -- or it might crash immediately. Can you fully predict how any particular installation will behave, given the vast possibilities of how the individual components might be (mis-)configured? Not during your natural lifetime.

Imagine you're writing a program, and consider the illustration below. The green circle represents your expected behavior; the blue circle represents your program's actual behavior:

All code has bugs, of course. Traditional bugs we can find and eliminate because they become obvious through testing: we expect certain behavior but instead we notice something wrong, so we re-examine the code, find the mistake, and fix it. Traditional bugs manifest themselves when we don't see what we expect to see.

Security bugs are almost always the opposite: non-obvious behavior that has somehow crept into our code, behavior that we don't know is there and don't really know to test for very well. Security bugs manifest themselves when we see what we don't expect to see. And people who specialize in attacking software are very, very good at seeking out the unexpected.

Earlier this summer my teenage son enrolled in a week-long summer camp to learn Java programming. On demonstration day, at the end of the course, parents were invited to view the projects their children had worked on during the week. My son created a simple text-based blackjack game. As I examined the code, I noticed well-formed structure and concise comments throughout. When I executed the program, it greeted me with this prompt:

Welcome to Blackjack!
Please select (1) to play or (2) to end:

Well, what do you think I did? As any proud parent would, I violated the instructions and entered "4." The program immediately crashed and dumped me into a debugger. My son couldn't figure out why I ignored the prompt! "Four isn't a choice, why didn't you pick one or two?" he asked. "Not everyone operates your software in only the ways you'd expect, you know," I replied. "Who would ever do that?" Heh. On the way home we discussed the importance of input validation and exception handling. You have to learn how to think like a bad guy if you don't want bad guys breaking your code.

Foundationally, there's no substitute for writing secure, resilient software -- software that expects to be abused, defends itself when under attack, and fails safely. Ross Anderson's book Security Engineering belongs on every developer's bookshelf, e- or otherwise. Build Security In is another excellent source for materials that can help you incorporate improved security coding practices into your software development programs.

On top of this critical foundation, additional layers help increase your defense. Because so much of today's software runs on the web, attacks against web applications outpace all others. Specific tools like our Stingray Application Firewall can help protect web applications from several attack vectors. Exploits of common vulnerabilities often present in third-party software can be detected and blocked. Path restriction and request/reply validation rules can thwart attempts to force web applications to misbehave. And over time, execution heuristics can suggest additional protective measures.

Software is under tremendous attack. Whether it's attacks against availability (denial of service), attacks against confidentiality (eavesdropping and interception), or attacks against integrity (malicious modification), the volume and impact show no signs of abating. Fortunately, the tools we have to defend ourselves against attack exhibit a wide diversity of detection and defensive capabilities, with increasing effectiveness and sophistication.

Catching up on Storytellers Contest Winners

We have fallen behind in announcing the winners of our Storytellers contest, and we apologize for that.  Over the next few weeks, we plan to get caught up. 

We start by going all the way back to July.  For the first time in one of our contests, our winner is a Riverbed Partner.  Daniel Thomson, who works for one of our partners, Teneo wrote a very compelling and interesting story.  Teneo is a reseller who has been partnered with Riverbed since 2004.  They have offices in Virginia as well as in London and Manchester in the UK, with over 1500 customers worldwide.

The customer that Daniel wrote about is a London-based media company, who needed to optimize their partners’ and customers’ ability to upload and download large media files, some as large as 500mb, from the road with unreliable and slow Internet access, and from different locations throughout the Asia Pacific region.  And they are doing these large and challenging uploads and downloads against tight advertising deadlines.

Teneo promotes the Riverbed Steelhead technology for a whole host of TCP applications and other services and partnerships that use the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP). In order to do this well, they have to gain a good understanding of their customers’ pain points and requirements.  Since 2004, they have used Riverbed products to help their customers resolve issues with bandwidth limitations, transport protocol and application and latency inefficiencies.

As for the story Daniel told in his winning entry:

• We are seeing 91% data reduction for media data sent and received over the public internet: 1.7GB of media data reduced to just 141MB across the Internet with a Mac Client
• 12.4x capacity increase over the Internet.

I love stories like that.  91% data reduction, and 12x the capacity.  You can get that too; if you did, would you still need to upgrade that WAN connection?

What is this Stingray Traffic Manager, anyway? (Part 4)

In today's Stingray Traffic Manager video, developer Alex Gosse discusses some of the visualization and traffic analysis features that are part of the Multi-Site Manager within Stingray Traffic Manager.

 

 

Technical Overview of Riverbed's Cascade

I have been getting a lot of questions recently from folks interested in learning more about the technical details of Riverbed's Cascade family of network performance management products.  Hopefully this blog post will answer many of those questions.

Cascade is an enterprise-wide network performance management solution, providing visibility into all your data centers, offices, and mobile users. It uses network flow data, supplemented with packet-based performance metrics, to discover applications, network dependencies, and monitor performance. It uses advanced behavioral analytics to track performance over time and alert you to any deviations from normal behavior. That way you can resolve problems before end-users are impacted.

Below is a look at the Cascade architecture.

 

Cascade consists of the following components:

Cascade Profiler

Provides centralized reporting and analysis of the data collected by other Cascade appliances (i.e., Gateway, Sensor, and Shark) and Steelhead products on a single user interface. It offers performance analytics, security analytics and proactive alerts for delivering application-aware monitoring and troubleshooting for your network. It combines all network data into a single data set with in-depth views that support flexible analysis of the information.

Cascade Gateway

Collects flow data from routers, switches and other network devices. It supports all standard flow types (NetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow, IPFIX, etc.). Cascade Gateway also collects Riverbed’s proprietary CascadeFlow, which is an enhanced version of NetFlow. CascadeFlow is exported by Steelhead appliances, and lets Cascade understand which interface(s) are WAN vs. LAN connected, identifies TCP retransmission counts, and determines the network round trip time for connections being optimized by Steelhead.For processed flow data destined for Cascade Profiler, Cascade Gateway aggregates, compresses, and encrypts the flow data, and then sends it to Cascade Profiler through Riverbed’s multi-purpose network management protocol (MNMP) on port TCP/41017. Cascade Gateway can transmit processed flow data to up to five Cascade Profiler or Cascade Express appliances in addition to sending the flow data it receives in an unprocessed manner to up to five other third-party devices. It can be deployed in the same location as the Profiler or regionally if topography requires.

Cascade Sensor

Passively inspects packets from SPAN ports or taps. It provides Layer 7 application classification and sends performance information, including end user experience metrics, to Cascade Profiler via Riverbed’s multi-purpose network management protocol (MNMP). It is typically deployed in data centers. A virtual edition, Sensor-VE, can be deployed as a Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) package on Steelhead appliances. Sensor-VE provides cost-effective visibility into branch office usage. It provides of many of the same capabilities of the Sensor appliance, with the exception of Layer 7 application classification.

Cascade Shark

Is a high-performance (1 GbE or 10 GbE) continuous packet capture, storage and analysis appliance. It is used for fast indexing and storage of multi-terabyte network traffic recordings so that a record of the traffic is available for retrospective analysis. Cascade Shark also provides micro-flow metrics to Cascade Profiler through MNMP. Micro-flow metrics enable the seamless integration from flow-level data to packet-level dataCascade Pilot seamlessly and securely integrates with remote Cascade Shark appliances to deliver a complete and feature-rich distributed network analysis solution.

Cascade Pilot

Is the only tool on the market to be fully integrated with Wireshark, the world’s most popular open source network protocol analyzer. While Cascade Profiler can provide visibility to all flows across the network, Cascade Pilot provides an in-depth view into problems requiring deep packet analysis. Cascade Pilot uses Riverbed’s unique XML-based protocol on top of an HTTPS connection to communicate with Cascade Shark.

Don't miss us at Autodesk University 2011

November 29 through December 1st I will be at Autodesk University at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas showcasing Riverbed's stellar results with Autodesk Vault. It has been an absolute pleasure collaborating with the Vault team.

Autodesk Vault is a data management tool which integrates with popular Autodesk products such as Inventor and AutoCAD. It provides a means for tracking files for management as well as version control for various Autodesk formats (dwg, revit) as well as non-Autodesk files (doc, xls). Vault server uses an SQL database backend and the client-server communication is done over HTTP.

Riverbed's HTTP optimization blade fits right into the Vault model providing huge benefits for client-server communication. In addition, we saw some great results in SQL performance over the WAN.

I highly encourage anyone attending the sessions to check out the 'Go Big or Go Home! Part3 - Extending Autodesk Vault to the Enterprise' class taught by Ross Tanner. Ross's class provides some great insights into:

• Configuring Sharepoint for extending Vault data to the enterprise
• Configuring Vault for the enterprise
• Impact of WAN acceleration for Vault optimization
• Describe what the new SharePoint integration can do for your organization

The schedule for Riverbed related talks are

Title	Date	Time	Presenter	Location
Riverbed Technologies – Breaking the WAN performance barrier	Tuesday, Nov 29th 2011	8:10pm	Avinash Shetty	Theater
Go Big or Go Home! Part 3 – Extending Autodesk® Vault to the Enterprise	Wednesday, Nov 30th 2011	10:15am	Ross Tanner	TBA
Riverbed Technologies – Breaking the WAN performance barrier	Wednesday, Nov 30th 2011	12:40pm	Avinash Shetty	Theater

Riverbed is a proud sponsor of the Autodesk University, one of only a handful of companies to do so. Please come by the Presentation Theater where I will be presenting the results of our latest study and a live demo. See you there.

Update 12/1/2011:

The Vault-Riverbed whitepaper is now live on the Autodesk website. We had a great AU2011.

What is this Stingray Traffic Manager, anyway? (Part 3)

In the third installment of our introduction to the Stingray Traffic Manager, developer Alex Gosse discusses how STM can be used to balance web site load between multiple physical locations, regardless of how far apart they are.

 

As we go through this multi-part series, if you have questions or want specific information about Stingray Trafffic Manager (or any other Riverbed products), please ask your questions in the comments, and we'll respond there.

A Day that Goes to Eleven

So today is November 11, 2011.  It's the 88th anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's birth.  It's Veterans Day in the  US. (The original Armstice Day commemorated the end of World War I, and the documents were officially signed at 11am on November 11, 1918.)

But as a guy who works with numbers, I've been thinking about the numeric form  of today's date, which for a change works in both the US and the UK... 11/11/11.  I've been thinking about 11s and how they appear in our culture.  My favorite 11 of recent times is the 11 that Nigel Tufnel's amp goes up to in "This is Spinal Tap," the wonderful 1984 movie.  There's also Apollo 11 (the first spacecraft to land men on the moon, in 1969), the 7-Eleven convenience stores, and so many more.  There's even a current horror movie called 11-11-11.  Elevens are all around us.

The trick, of course, as I put this blog article together was to come up with a clever way to tie all that stuff into Riverbed.  Normally we look for the Riverbed tie-in before we choose the topic.  Not so much today. 

Very (VERY) late one night last week, one of my colleagues pointed out to me that the binary form of the ASCII space character is 01010101, and since one of the things that our Steelhead Appliances do so well is remove the empty spaces in your network traffic, you can think of that 01010101 as simply 1111 after it's been optimized down. That's it. That's all I've got today.  No videos, no nothing.  We'll get back to that stuff on Monday.

Well, I didn't promise anything especially profound today.  It's really a totally made up event anyway, as the dates and numbers on the calendar are almost totally arbitrary. 

Hoping that you take a few minutes to enjoy Elevenses today...

What is this Stingray Traffic Manager, anyway? (Part 2)

In this, our second in a series of videos on the Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager, Developer Alex Gosse talks about its ability to both balance traffic and monitor traffic loads per service or per user.