blogs.riverbed.com

The rise of the 'false cloud'

I'm currently at the GigaOm Structure conference, listening to the CTO of Amazon. One of the more entertaining comments he made was that private clouds should be called false clouds. He certainly got a good chuckle from the audience , but what do you think?

Riverbed Think Fast Demo - Microsoft Exchange

Riverbed Think Fast Demo - Microsoft SharePoint

Riverbed announces RiOS 6.1 update for Steelhead appliances

A big day today in technology news. On the consumer side, Apple will be unveiling their new gadgets during their worldwide developer conference in San Francisco.

Not to be outdone, Riverbed is generating excitement today in the IT landscape with the launch of the RiOS 6.1, a hefty software update to Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead appliance.

RiOS 6.1 has new optimizations for Microsoft applications like Exchange 2010 and Microsoft Online Services and storage optimizations for SRDF and FCIP. There is HA support for RSP. With this release Riverbed delivers superior acceleration across a wide variety of infrastructure, thereby providing maximum performance for any cloud, architecture or application.

Riverbed is announcing a lot of Industry Firsts with this software update.

With RiOS 6.1, Riverbed is the first WAN Optimization vendor to offer optimizations for the following:

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2010(Encrypted and Unencrypted Mode
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010
• Microsoft Online Services (Exchange Online and SharePoint Online)
• SVVP Certified for Windows Server 2008 R2
• Lotus Notes 8.5
• EMC SRDF/A Optimization (Network and Application layer) and auto-configuration

Microsoft Optimizations
Accelerating Microsoft Applications from wherever they are located. With this release, customers running Exchange 2010 can see data reductions of up to 95% and more than 34 times faster transmission thereby reducing the effects of latency. There are enhanced optimizations for Share Point that further reduces the effects of latency and speeds up response time by up to 50% over previous versions of RiOS.
This release also provides support for optimizing Microsoft Online services aka Microsoft BPOS-D like Exchange Online and Share Point Online. The optimizations work in both encrypted and unencrypted environments for Exchange 2010 and Exchange Online.

Lotus Notes Optimizations
Enhanced support for optimizing Lotus Notes v8.5. For those customers with Lotus Domino and Notes environments, RiOS 6.1 delivers latency optimizations and improved application response times thereby improving the end user experience.
Storage Optimizations

Accelerating replication and DR traffic – enabling higher levels of data reduction and throughput
Customers that use EMC's Symmetrix V-MAX and DMX will benefit from a higher data reduction and better throughput due to the SRDF optimizations in this release. This release supports "auto-disable compression" for SRDF/A allowing for even better optimization for EMC environments. This release also provides FCIP optimizations and is certified and qualified with Brocade 7500 and Cisco MDS gateways.

Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) High Availability
Improved support for RSP in HA environments. RSP has been deployed successfully as a branch office box (BOB) solution across a wide array of customers. HA support for RSP allows customers the flexibility to consolidate branch office services without impacting availability.

Improved Network Resiliency
Added support in WCCP environments. With this release Riverbed is providing added support for multiple interfaces on the Steelhead appliance to participate in WCCP groups on one or more routers. This enables two use cases - load balancing traffic across multiple interfaces and fail-over to a secondary interface when the primary interface fails.

Central Management Console
RSP Management via CMCs. The CMC now can streamline the deployment and configuration of RSP and RSP packages. The new UI shows per-appliance health and status of RSP service and individual packages. Also there is now support for up to 2,000 Steelhead appliances managed by a single CMC

For me personally, the one issue I have with this software update is why is it named "6.1". Sure feels like a 7.0 update!  Riverbed customers have access this this software update by going to support.riverbed.com.

Steelhead appliance

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

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.

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.