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WAN Optimization, Security, and the Federal Market

For the typical enterprise customer, selecting a WAN optimization vendor usually starts with identifying solutions that do a good job accelerating the applications they care about, are scalable, and can be seamlessly deployed within their IT infrastructure.  For the government customer, there is arguably an even more important consideration that goes above and beyond speed, scalability, and simplicity and that is security.  There are 3 key security considerations for government organizations selecting a WAN optimization vendor.

1.  The existing secure infrastructure must not be weakened

Features need to be in place that ensure that as WAN optimization devices and/or software is deployed, additional security risks are not introduced. 

For example, Riverbed offers the ability to SSL encrypt the traffic between Steelhead appliances.  In addition to encrypting the traffic in flight over the WAN, Riverbed also offers the ability to encrypt the chunked data that is stored on the Steelhead appliance for optimization.  Up to 256 bit AES is supported.  The result is that with Riverbed, you get an end-to-end WAN optimization solution that is secure.

2.  You must be able to accelerate secure applications

Federal organizations that have deployed web-based applications that are SSL-encrypted, have encrypted Exchange email, or have applied SMB-signing to their file sharing environment to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks are often forced to make the trade-off between application acceleration for security.  For many WAN optimization vendors, they will simply pass this traffic through unoptimized or worse, will ask the customer to turn off security so they can achieve acceleration.

Riverbed has done a tremendous amount of engineering work to optimize and accelerate these encrypted environments.  With Riverbed, Federal organizations don't have to turn off SSL encryption, Exchange encryption, or SMB signing.  You get to have your cake and eat it too.  Accelerate your applications, while maintaining a secure environment.

3.  Must comply with federal security standards

Large government organizations, civilian agencies, and militaries deploy IT equipment that runs on networks, in data centers, in office buildings, and even in tents or vehicles to support a military endeavors.  This equipment must not only be secure, but it must comply with federal security standards including FIPS, Common Criteria, and JITC.  These federal security standard requirements are often extended to WAN optimization devices as well.

Riverbed has invested a large amount of resources to ensure that our products meet these Federal security standards.

If you are interested in finding out more about how Riverbed has been selected by government agencies around the world to accelerate applications, optimize bandwidth, consolidate IT infrastructure, and optimize disaster recovery, while doing it securely, please drop me an email.

Bob Gilbert
bob@riverbed.com

Riverbed eats it's own dogfood and saves more than $2M

In the latest edition of the Riverbed Connect podcast, Bob Gilbert chats with Tom Bakewell, Riverbed's CIO about how he is using his company's product internally to save more than 2 million dollars.  The case study is also available here for download.

Video: Global Forestry Slashes Costs with Riverbed Steelheads

A global forestry company looked to Riverbed to enable consolidation of 8 Data Centers down to 2 and 280 remote servers consolidated from the branch offices to the data centers. Application performance is 12 to 18 times faster with Riverbed.

5 things to look for when choosing a WAN optimization vendor

I recently blogged about the ABCD's of WAN optimization in an attempt to simplify the understanding of how this technology adds value to IT organizations.  After hopefully gaining a better understanding of WAN optimization, the obvious next step is to choose which WAN optimization vendor's product to deploy.  As Riverbed's evangelist, I am obviously biased, but I thought I would plot out what I see as the 5 key things to look for when selecting a WAN optimization vendor.

1.  Customer and industry recognition

Customer references remain king regardless of the product, technology, or service.  We see this with social media platforms like Yelp where the community shares their experience with a variety of businesses.  If a large percentage of the community rates the business highly, then there is a better chance that your experience will be positive as well.  The same holds true for WAN optimization.  Ask your vendor candidates to provide several customers that you can call to ask how their experience has been.  Even better, ask for references that represent an environment similar to your own.  Be wary of vendors that only have a small amount of references or simply provide you with case studies in lieu of someone that can accept a phone call.

In addition to customers, talk to industry experts to get their take.  For example, Gartner is one of the premiere analysts that covers the WAN optimization market.  They publish a Magic Quadrant spotlighting leaders and visionaries in this market.  These industry experts have done their homework and while their opinion is at the end of the day, just an opinion, it is an expert opinion.

2.  Proven ROI

Value and return on investment is cornerstone to any technology deployed in today's economic landscape.  Ask each vendor to go through an ROI exercise based on your environment in order to determine what the potential savings would be.  While the product cost varies from vendor to vendor, so does the ROI once you figure in the deployment costs, optimization results, and cost of the product as well.  It is also a good idea to ask for both customer and 3rd party ROI validation.  Beware of products that are considerably less as the old adage "you get what you paid for" often applies.

3.  Speed, Scalability, Simplicity

At the end of the day, it's usually about speed\acceleration\optimization.  How much acceleration do you get with each WAN optimization vendor?  Many vendors will tout acceleration for varying applications, but vendors differ in their implementation.  Look for vendors that have developed acceleration techniques geared towards mitigating the latency impact on the performance for your specific application. 

WAN optimization encompasses IT infrastructure technology that is often deployed as an appliances (hardware/virtual) at a branch office and data center and software that is deployed in mobile worker's laptops.  Scalability of this IT infrastructure as far as being able to address the demands of your user, network, and application loads is critical for very large deployments where there are large amounts of users and branch offices.  Being able to scale down can be very critical as well.  If you have small offices with only a handful of users, does the WAN optimization vendor offer a product specifically designed for your environment?

One of the often overlooked comparison points of WAN optimization is simplicity.  How simple is the product to deploy?  How much IT staff is required for the initial deployment and ongoing maintenance?  test each vendor by timing how long it takes from un-boxing to optimization.

4.  Product Features and Breadth of Capabilities

You may be surprised that product features is this far down on the list.  The truth is that once you test for speed, scalability, and simplicity, the product features usually take second stage.  For example, if your application is SSL-encrypted, vendors that have developed SSL acceleration features should rise to the top during your testing.  Vendor acceleration features in the areas of web-based apps to Lotus Notes optimization to thin client acceleration vary greatly as do their ability to accelerate these applications. Beware of vendors that claim acceleration of an application only to find out they they don't solve the latency impact on performance.  Once again, make sure your applications are part of your WAN optimization test plans.

There are features very applicable to WAN optimization that are not necessarily about optimization or acceleration specifically.  For example, the ability to provide end-to-end visibility into the network and applications is important for both identifying additional opportunities for optimization along with monitoring the effectiveness of the WAN optimization devices themselves.  Some vendors offer a robust visibility solution while others are well behind in this important aspect of WAN optimization.

Another feature to look for is the ability to run branch office services such as domain controller, print, DNS/DHCP directly from a WAN optimization device.  A number of vendors provide a virtualization layer where you can run these services on their box, providing the ability to consolidate a number of servers and appliances at the branch.  Think branch office box functionality.

5.  Company Viability and ability to Support

Last, but certainly not least is the viability of the vendor and their ability to adequately support their product.  A WAN optimization solution can be a big investment with great value and a tremendous ROI, but your investment could be a bad one if you choose a vendor on the way down, instead of up.  Is the vendor's business growing or shrinking?  Do they have ample resources to focus on your success after the sale?  If you are a global company, do they provide global support?

If you would like to hear from me specifically about Riverbed's response to each of the above five points, please respond and let me know.  I would also love to hear your feedback and if there is maybe something I missed.

Bob Gilbert
bob@riverbed.com

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.

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.

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!

Microsoft and Riverbed forge OEM relationship

Riverbed recently announced a broadened relationship with Microsoft that results in Windows Server 2008 as an integrated option running within the RSP (Riverbed Services Platform) on Riverbed's Steelhead appliance.

This licensing agreement between Riverbed and Microsoft further solidifies Riverbed's position as the go-to WAN optimization vendor when it comes to helping organizations successfully perform branch office server consolidation projects. 

In this harsh economic climate when organizations are looking to cut costs in any way they can, server consolidation is an ideal way to reduce hardware costs, lower power consumption, and reduce costly management hours.  While consolidation makes obvious sense, undergoing complete consolidation where all servers are centralized at the data center is not possible for many.  There are services like domain controlling, print, and dns/dhcp that organizations want to keep local in a branch.  The result is that some servers must remain and that means that the solid cost savings benefit from consolidation isn't totally realized. 

While WAN optimization can help with the performance problems associated with consolidation, many WAN optimization vendors do nothing to help with the consolidation of these local services.  With Riverbed's licensing of Windows Server 2008, organizations can consolidate these branch office servers locally in the VMware equipped virtualization environment on the Steelhead appliance.  At the same time, Riverbed's Steelhead appliance addresses the performance problems when accessing those servers that have been centralized and consolidated to the data center.  Sounds like a no-brainer?  I agree!

I would like to hear from you on your plans for consolidation and whether the need to keep some services local has impacted you consolidation effort.  Maybe Riverbed can help!

Making history....

2005

The New England Patriots win their 3^rd Superbowl.

Riverbed wins their 1^st InfoWorld Technology of the Year award for best WAN accelerator.

 

2006

Italy wins their 4^th World Cup.

Riverbed wins their 2^nd InfoWorld Technology of the Year award for best WAN accelerator.

 

2007

Boston Red Sox win their 7^th World Series.

Riverbed wins their 3^rd InfoWorld Technology of the Year award for best WAN accelerator.

 

2008

Tiger Woods wins his 14^th major championship.

Riverbed wins their 4^th InfoWorld Technology of the Year award for best WAN accelerator.

 

2009

Barack Obama becomes the 44^th president of the United States.

Riverbed wins their 5^th InfoWorld Technology of the Year award for best WAN accelerator.

 

Unbelievable success.

Read more about it on InfoWorld's website.

A day of firsts

Hello, world.  First let me introduce myself: Nik Rouda, senior marketing manager for the Steelhead appliances.  This is my first blog posting at Riverbed, and what a lot of news there is to share.  We’re doing our first quadruple product launch today: the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) 5.5, the enhanced Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), Steelhead Mobile 2.0, and new hardware models. 

With the RiOS 5.5 release we’re introducing a number of industry “first to market” features, continually extending our technological leadership and comprehensive approach.  We’re the first vendor to offer application layer performance optimization for Lotus Notes, developed alongside IBM.  We’re the first to partner with VMware and put their virtualization technology directly on a WAN optimization appliance.  We’ve added numerous performance enhancements for disaster recovery and replication.  And we’re the first to offer a completely seamless range of field upgradeable hardware from desktop to 3U models.  All of these help our customers do more with less, getting better performance and productivity while reducing operating expenses.

All of this is a result of our philosophy of putting customers first and responding to their needs for speed, scale, simplicity, and cost savings.  While our competitors’ products may feel like they’re stuck in first gear, we’re roaring along with new innovations to improve your productivity on the information superhighway.  They’re just getting to first base in offering features we’ve had for years, and we’re hitting grand slam home runs for our customers.  While the competition is stuck in the pits trying to fix problems, we’re leading the race in first place according to both Gartner and Forrester.

Today is the first day of the rest of your IT life.  Carpe diem and be the first on your block to check out all the new offerings from Riverbed.

Can you fool your users?

For most companies, 'user acceptance' is the true litmus test of whether or not a new product will be purchased. But do you think you could deploy a new product that impacts the user without telling them? That's exactly what CNP construction did.

Top 10 Storage Inventions of All Time

Byte and Switch recently wrote about the top 10 storage inventions of all time and while I agree with most of the items on the list, they seem to have left off WAN optimization or Wide-area Data Services (WDS)!

Although data-deduplication is listed as #8, the context is with regards to data at rest and not data in flight.  This list item is obviously aimed at the specific impact that data-deduplication has on data that resides on the storage device.  There is a strong argument to be made that data-deduplication for data in-flight combined with the other performance optimizations that WDS provides has proven to be an important invention that impacts storage directly.  You might be asking how does WDS impact storage?

What do CIOs really spend their time thinking about

I recently had the opportunity to see first hand what CIOs spend their time doing. I attended the annual technology forum of one of the 10 largest companies in the world.

Riverbed customer testimonial - Silicon Image

Peeling back the Onion on a Sales Call

It's interesting to see how "potential customer" interests have changed over the last 5 years.

In 2003, when I was first meeting with customers, talking about this product we were working on, everyone agreed that they had challenges in their network with remote users. The challenges varied — either performance of centralized applications/servers, or backing up their remote servers (ok, and a few who wanted to centralize).  But everyone blamed bandwidth as the culprit for poor performance.  Often they couldn't afford the larger links, but sometimes they had already upgraded and were scratching their heads as to why it didn't help as much as last time.

So, since they viewed it as a bandwidth problem, we'd explain our killer compression (SDR), and they'd spend 90% of the meeting focused on that, then graciously allow us to talk about what we wanted to discuss, which was how transaction prediction (and VWE) would ameliorate the effects of latency and really speed things up. Sometimes light bulbs would nearly visibly go off over people's heads, usually I got a "hm, I'm sure that'll help too, now back to SDR, what happens when..."

Later they'd test the product (as no one believed our speedup claims...remember WDS hadn't even been invented as a term and we were this dinky startup), and be amazed.  The vast amount of their speedup, of course was due to transaction prediction, the majority of the time.

So, how about 2008?  Last week I was meeting with a large financial enterprise, discussing their challenges.  They knew that latency was the root of application performance problems, and we spent most of the time talking about that (still did discuss SDR — as they'd rather not get more OC3s).  But they were puzzled with their test results — things were clearly faster (i.e. stopwatching user actions), and the reports showed dramatic bandwidth reduction on the Steelhead, but the routers reported the WAN links were still full — where were the "savings" coming from.  Anyone see the answer to this mystery?

Well, the data reduction enabled more traffic to flow, and the transaction prediction stopped applications being bottlenecked on the WAN, also enabling more traffic to flow, so...  People got more done — in the same amount of time — thus the WAN was "full again."  It's sort of Parkinson's Law experienced in a different domain (and with a more hopeful spin).

So, how far have we come?  It's mixed, the great news is that people are aware of latency and it's insidious effects.  We still have a ways to go with the second order implications of this though, i.e. that filling a WAN link can actually be a good sign.  And someone needs to come up with a way to measure ROI on knowledge workers — surely them getting more done in a day is valuable to the enterprise. 

So, what do you think...Latency*chattyness is now well understood, or still breaking news?

Welcome to the Think Fast blog

From our experiences interacting with the community at the WDS Forum, we know there are lively ongoing conversations about wide-area data services, acceleration, consolidation, and related topics.  We're adding one more source of information here as we initiate Think Fast, our Riverbed corporate blog. Our goal is to be concise, accurate, and helpful -- we want to extend our focus on customer success to this additional vehicle.

We love learning what really matters to you. We also really value our opportunities to explain the ideas and motivations behind our products, and their place in the larger IT universe.  We hope this blog enables more of these great interactions, and we're looking forward to them.

Mark Day, Chief Scientist, Riverbed