The Riverbed Blog

Demonstration of Riverbed Granite

Bob Gilbert demonstrates Granite, which is Riverbed's groundbreaking edge virtual server infrastructure technology.

 

 

Introducing Riverbed Granite

Senior Product Marketing Manager Eric Carter provides an introduction to Granite, which is Riverbed's groundbreaking Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure product.

 

Riverbed Granite In Action

"It does what...?"

I've heard this double-take question more than once as we describe what Riverbed Granite is able to do.  The innovation sometimes takes a minute to sink in.  "Separate storage from compute?  Solve the problem at the block-level? What does that mean anyway?"  What it means is that Riverbed customers have a new arrow in their consolidation quiver.  

By delivering the breakthrough of accelerating at the block-level across the WAN, Granite enables organizations to do things they couldn't do before. We sometimes have described Granite as being able to "consolidate the un-consolidatable."  And its true.  Anyone who has found themselves shackled by requirements for servers in the branch because of the need for local block-storage access should keep reading. In the remainder of this entry I will highlight examples of Granite in action.  In other words - let me give a few use cases - and hopefully if you've got anything considered "un-consolidatable" you'll see how Granite - and the new Edge-VSI approach can help you.

Consolidate and Control

Imagine a growing business - one that is generating a lot of data with custom applications that are running in global locations. You're happy to be growing, but you're left managing servers in places you never thought you'd visit. Ever. You've got valuable data "assets" in locations that lets say are a bit on the sketchy side.  But business is business. Can't strip out the servers/storage or else business can't flow - or can it?  Granite's unique capability to project block-level storage from the data center to the edge means you CAN CONTROL the data in the data center, and run virtualized instances of your branch-bound applications at the edge. Every single block of data is managed on your enterprise-class storage area network (SAN) in the data center even though it is serving the needs of far flung branches. Go and Grow - your concerns about where that data is are alleviated. You know where it is. You control it.

Consolidate and Simplify

What about management? We've heard from many customers about the cost and effort of managing the remaining infrastructure in the branch - servers, storage, backup. Granite and the concept of Edge-VSI make it possible to establish a "stateless" branch office in the sense that virtualized applications can run on compute in the branch but data stores are located within and managed from the data center. Here your business can Grow as you Go.  A site can easily connect a VM to a Granite "projected" storage LUN from the data center.  Size it for today.  Need more space in the future?  Expand the LUN at the data center and the branch gets more space - just like that.  No need to fly in to install new hard drives.  

Consolidate and Protect

Backup in the branch. It's not really your ideal scenario, but the data is there so you've mapped out how to make sure it's protected. Maybe it's a tape backup once every 24 hours - sent back to HQ - and recovery is that in reverse. Or maybe you backup over the WAN. In either case there's the added expense and worry of setting up the infrastructure, managing it - and hoping for the best. With Granite, data that was once thousands of miles away is now within your enterprise SAN - a very well qualified "offsite location". In the data center it can be protected with your mature data center data protection practices. It's much easier to move beyond once-a-day recovery points to something more frequent. Pair that with youre already-established replication between data centers and you've got full fledged enterprise-class protection for that data that was once somewhere "out there." You can restore in a number of ways. Catastrophic loss in the branch? Set up a new Granite Edge and reconnect to the data center. Or restore at a more granular level and stream back to the branch on demand. Even if your active branch doesn't quite appreciate the new level of protection, they will be very happy with faster restores.

Hopefully these use cases illuminate for you what we mean when we say that Granite enables a new architectural approach to consolidation. It is of course exciting to launch a new technology in the marketplace - and we at Riverbed are equally excited for you to try Granite for yourself to see the possibilities it can bring to your business.

The importance of agility

 An underappreciated aspect of the Steelhead product line is that it has a diverse set of form factors and – crucially – those different packages all use the same optimization architecture, and thus interoperate. What does that mean for a customer?  It gives tremendous flexibility to adapt to changes in how data and users are distributed, without needing to cause ripple effects elsewhere in the infrastructure.  Let’s consider a simple (and common) example first before we move on to looking at the larger implications. 

Organizations often have some branch offices that are very small.  For the very smallest offices and individual users, it’s usually not hard to decide that the right solution is to use Steelhead Mobile on a laptop or workstation.  And when you get to  10-12 people in an office, both the technology and the ROI arguments for a Steelhead appliance (physical or virtual) are pretty easy to make.  But there’s an area in the middle, around 5-6 users, where there’s enough overlap of capabilities that either approach could work.  Add to this that a given office may grow or shrink enough so that the original configuration in the office may need to be replaced with a different one.

 Using the Steelhead family, these choices and changes at the branch can be accommodated with no additional impact on the data center side.  For a given workload from a given set of users, it just doesn’t matter whether they’re coming from a Steelhead appliance or Steelhead Mobile. 

 Now, if you’re only familiar with Riverbed, at this point your reaction is probably something like “so what?  Big deal!”  But let’s look at just this one scenario with the #2 vendor: their mobile client doesn’t use the same technology as their appliance, so you have to have two separate data-center infrastructures to support the branches if you have a mixture of the technologies.  And as you migrate a given branch from appliance to mobile or vice-versa, you’re changing the load on the corresponding data-center pieces. 

 That divided-technology approach means that it’s easy with the #2 vendor to be in a situation where an apparently-straightforward change at a branch gets tripped up because it exceeds the capacity of some piece of data center infrastructure.  Another layer of complexity comes from the fact that these two different technologies have different network characteristics: their appliance uses an autodiscovery mechanism somewhat like the way that Steelheads work, while their mobile client needs an explicit connection set up to its data-center counterpart.  Their appliance marketing repeatedly insists on the necessity of transparency and the avoidance of tunnels, while the mobile client uses a tunnel-based system – so it’s possible that a particular branch network configuration that works with one of the technologies simply won’t work with the other.

 It’s tempting to say that the divided-technology problem of the #2 vendor is just a typical lapse by a very large company, and that smaller competitors would have a better approach. So we look at the #3 vendor in our space, which is a private company that prides itself on only doing WAN optimization.  But they don’t have any mobile client at all!  So their theory is that you should just pretend that you don’t need WAN optimization when you’re out on the road and dealing with networks in coffee shops and hotels – exactly the opposite of most real-world experience.  And apparently when your branch is too small to support an appliance or virtual appliance, you should just stop using WAN optimization.  (All of a sudden, the #2 vendor looks really good by comparison.)

Before we leave this topic, it’s worth noting that the preceding comparison actually understates the Riverbed advantage. A further advantage comes from the fact that Steelhead Mobile and a Steelhead appliance (physical or virtual) can cooperate via branch warming. In branch warming, Steelhead Mobile and a local Steelhead appliance work together: each time a piece of "optimization vocabulary" is used by the machine running Steelhead Mobile, the mobile client and the appliance coordinate so that both have a copy.  As the mobile client is used in the branch office, their vocabularies will tend to converge.

Without spending too much time on the details of how it works, let’s talk about where it’s useful:  Sometimes there are enough people in an office to justify an appliance, but the nature of the work means that some or all of them have a significant need for mobility – often because they are salespeople, hands-on repair technicians, or field supervisors.  They can use Steelhead Mobile when they are on the road, but they stop needing a mobile license when they’re in the office, and they take the benefits of their office work (newly learned optimizations) back on the road with them when they leave. 

 Now let’s talk about the bigger picture of why this matters.  After all, your organization may not have small branches or mobile users, so that set of examples might not impress you. But the same general principle of agility through a common architecture is more broadly useful, and almost certainly can make a difference to your organization now or in a future configuration.

 A way of getting a handle on this is to list out the different “packages” of Steelhead technology:

• Physical appliance
• Virtual appliance
• Cluster of appliances (physical and/or virtual)
• Software client
• Cloud-integrated service
• “Blade” for HP switch

 All of these interoperate with each other – so it’s easy to go “physical to virtual” or vice-versa without needing to disrupt the other side of the application.  Likewise it’s easy to have a set of services growing beyond the capacity of a single appliance, or migrating into (or out of) a cloud service, without prompting a redesign or redeployment of the client side.

 Again, a comparison with the #2 vendor is illuminating. A casual examination of their WAN optimization product line would suggest a similar kind of breadth and agility. They have a variety of packages of WAN optimization technology. But it turns out that the commonality is more marketecture than architecture.  That is, they use a common branding for what are actually 3 very-different classes of products: what we might call “main”, “mobile”, and “express.”  The “mobile” products can’t interoperate at all with “main” products or with “express” products.  The “main” products and “express” products can interoperate, but only at the lower level of function supported by the “express” products.  So actually trying to use the #2 vendor products for Riverbed-like agility can lead to all sorts of unpleasant surprises, as WAN optimization functionality either doesn’t work at all (mobile/main and mobile/express combinations) or works with sharply reduced functionality and performance (main/express combinations).

IT organizations need agility and flexibility to meet changing circumstances and demands.  The Riverbed single common architecture approach for WAN optimization helps ensure that Steelhead technology can help meet that need.

Riverbed 101 - An introduction video to Riverbed's products

Bob Gilbert gives a high level overview of Riverbed's products.

 

 

The same, but different

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."   With all of the challenges and the increasing pace of decisions that need to be made in corporate IT these days, I suspect there are a lot of geniuses running enterprise networks!

Many of our customers tell me they have a similar dilemma -- "I have a lot of branch offices and sites, each with their own personality, requirements and expectations, yet I achieve a lot of benefit in IT by keeping things the same as much as possible, in terms of reducing complexity and costs."    For example, some sites may need an enterprise class firewall or a print server, while other more remote sites are not directly connected to the Internet or need fewer services.  Virtualization offers benefits here -- by increasing the flexibility by which software and services can be deployed, branch offices can be deployed as a uniform framework across many sites, while enabling administrators to clearly define where customization can and cannot be deployed.

Riverbed has been shipping a technology called RSP, the Riverbed Services Platform, for quite some time now -- I love to bring this up this solution with customers who are facing this problem of managing multiple heterogeneous sites.   One of Riverbed's strengths is that our technology can optimize almost anything that travels across a customer's WAN, so by standardizing on Riverbed Steelheads for their WAN performance needs, they keep costs and complexity low.

Now, enter RSP:  by adding additional services running virtually on Steelheads deployed at the branches, each site can be changed to suit the individual needs of that site, while still maintaining a consistent virtualized platform across the enterprise.   I like to think of RSP as the Swiss Army knife of the branch.  We have customers running everything from Windows Server 2008R2, to Linux, to one of our numerous technology partners on RSP, all to satisfy the specific requirements of each site.  Some examples are:

• DNS, DHCP, Print, and other services on Windows Server.  This is a common use case that allows you to run lightweight services at the branch virtually, without additional hardware.  You can even add additional storage to the Windows VM with iSCSI, or enable Branch Cache on the VM to add one-way file caching.

• Steelhead Mobile Controller Virtual Edition (SMC-VE) Sites that have mobile users that need acceleration can benefit by consolidating and simplifying deployment, management and reporting functions.

• Cascade Sensor VE.   Often, Steelhead appliances sit near the branch gateway and have a bird's eye view of traffic entering and exiting the branch.  By adding a Cascade Sensor VE, this information can be visualized, analyzed and reported.

• Firewalls and Security Technologies:  including McAfee Firewall Enterprise Virtual Edition and Check Point Secure Gateway.

• Branch Office Routing:  by using Vyatta on RSP, you can easily turn your Steelhead into an OSPF or IS-IS router, for example, for sites that need more sophisticated routing needs.

All in all, you can run up to 5 virtual machine instances on each RSP platform, and manage all of them under one interface using the Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC).  This is an easy way by which you can make your branch offices the same, but different enough to fulfill the diverse requirements of the distributed enterprise.

The WAN of Your Dreams

Look, I know it isn't easy. Nobody likes to put themselves out there, face the fear of the unknown. Why rock the boat, right? You're probably thinking to yourself, "I'm happy with my WAN. It's a decent, hard-working WAN. Sure, there are problems, but no WAN is perfect." Now tell me something, don't you think you deserve better? Don't you deserve a WAN that makes you truly happy?

Imagine a WAN that goes above and beyond for you. A WAN that doesn't make you wait an interminable 30 seconds every time you transfer a file. A WAN that doesn't hinder your consolidation efforts with it's insufferable latency. A WAN that gives you superior application performance without dictating where your servers are?  This isn't too much to ask. 

The Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS)

The Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) is the only solution within the WAN optimization industry to  utilize four different technologies to create your perfect WAN. RiOS software powers Steelhead products through a combination of patent-pending data reduction, TCP optimization, and application-level protocol optimizations. Together, these technologies provide a comprehensive solution for true WAN compatibility. (Streamlining descriptions excerpted from the Riverbed Steelhead Product Family data sheet).

1. Data Streamlining

Data streamlining – RiOS data streamlining works across all TCP applications to reduce bandwidth   utilization, typically by 60% to 95%. Data streamlining works across file sharing, email, CAD, ERP, web-based HTTP and HTTPS applications, databases, virtual desktops, and all other applications that use TCP.

 

2. Transport Streamlining

Transport streamlining – RiOS transport streamlining reduces the number of TCP packets required to transfer data by 65% to 98%. Transport streamlining also enables the acceleration of SSL-encrypted traffic throughout the enterprise to eliminate the security and performance trade-off.

3. Application Streamlining

Application streamlining – RiOS application streamlining offers the broadest support of application-specific modules for key enterprise applications to provide additional application performance improvements on top of the data streamlining and transport streamlining optimizations performed on all TCP traffic.

4. Management Streamlining

Management streamlining – RiOS enables easy deployment through auto-discovery of peers and auto-interception of traffic, with no reconfiguration of clients, servers, or routers. Simple integration into the network has led to Riverbed deployments in a vast array of network environments and topologies including, but not limited to, MPLS, VoIP, video conferencing, QoS, VPN, satellite infrastructure, ATM, frame relay, microwave, and wireless. 

Riverbed is committed to helping you find the WAN of your dreams, and with over 10,000 customers, we are confident that we can.  So begin your Riverbed experience register today for a free trial. After all, over 80 of the Fortune 100 can't be wrong. Hurry, your perfect WAN is waiting!

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - Happy Birthday United States of America

The 4^th of July, The Glorious Fourth,  Independence Day or the birthday of the United States of America  are all names that are used to recognize the day the declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress. This day marked the legal separation of the 13 colonies from Great Britain and opened new opportunities for the people of the United States to have certain unalienable rights.

 Second sentence from the Declaration of Independence states “ We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that amongst these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

 Much like the 13 colonies that declared their independence in July 4, 1776, knowledge workers should also have unalienable rights including the liberty to access data anywhere, any time without having to deal with bandwidth and latency issues which we would all agree, if not addressed, would dampen our pursuit of happiness!

 So in tribute to the 4^th let me suggest 4 ways to gain independence and performance happiness.

 1.       Know your applications and make sure to choose a WAN optimization vendor that can give you application specific acceleration.  Riverbed prides ourselves in supporting the broadest range of layer-7 application-specific optimizations of any WAN optimization vendor.  Chances are that we can improve the performance of the applications you are running

2.       Make sure that your choice supports all environments - data center, branch office, mobile workers, VDI, private cloud, public cloud, etc.  Riverbed offers WAN optimization technology that delivers best-of-breed performance for all environments eliminating the need to have different vendor interfaces, integration, and performance standards.

3.       Know where your performance issues are and have the right tools to quickly drill down to the root cause.  Riverbed’s application-aware Network Performance Management (NPM) integrated architecture gives customers robust real-time network and application performance analytics, resulting in complete top-down visibility into their network and applications. Cascade is the only NPM solution on the market that fully consolidates real-time business-level performance views with packet-level analysis all in a single data set that users can seamlessly navigate in order to quickly and accurately diagnose and troubleshoot network and application performance problems.

4.       Chose a vendor that has industry leading support. In April of this year Riverbed was recognized and certified by J.D. Power and Associates and TSIA for excellence in Global Customer Service and Support. These certifications acknowledge excellence in delivering outstanding service and support on a worldwide basis to Riverbed customers. Riverbed is one of a select few companies to receive this distinction for global certification under both the J.D. Power and Associates CTSS and the TSIA Excellence in Service Operations program in the same year.

 Typical 4^th of July tradition is to celebrate by hosting a barbeque, watching fireworks or by decorating in the colors of the American flag – red, white, and blue. For our Riverbed customer’s we encourage you to celebrate your performance independence by celebrating in the spirit of the 4^th.

 So whether you enjoy a nice steak and Steelhead, have some Cascade and cocktails, or decide to parade the streets decorated in Riverbed orange, we wish you a very happy Independence day!

Don't Make Important Choices in a Vacuum!

Let's face it, choosing a WAN optimization product from the various vendor offerings can be confusing and difficult, because all of the vendors seem to say the same things about their products.  They all make similar-sounding claims about fast LAN-like performance, server consolidation, cost savings, etc.  And if what they all were saying were true, then it would be rather a simple matter to just choose a vendor based on lowest price, since supposedly every vendor's product pretty much does the same thing.

And while that is precisely what many vendors would have you believe, the truth is that there are very significant differences among the various vendor offerings in the WAN optimization market.  Tragically, numerous customers have found that out the hard way, making the mistake of purchasing a WAN optimization product that didn't work or scale for their network.

A lab test or live proof-of-concept (POC) may help. A test or POC allows customers to get familiar with the look and feel of each product they are evaluating.  But there are limitations to what a lab test or POC can reveal about a product.  Just about every WAN optimization product will work fine in a protected, limited-scale deployment where they are not fully-exposed to WAN disruptions, heavy data center traffic loads, and other nasty things that inevitably happen in a live production network.  It's a huge mistake to assume that just because a particular vendor product works adequately when deployed to 2 or 3 sites in a POC, that it will also work fine when deployed to 20 or 30 sites.

When considering a large enterprise-scale deployment of WAN optimization devices, the most important step in the evaluation process is talking to another customer with a similar-sized network who has also deployed products from the vendor under consideration.  There simply is no substitute for that.

Checking references involves more than listening to vague anecdotal accounts of "success" by the vendor's sales rep.  Rather, it's very important to obtain the contact info of another customer who has deployed and used the vendor's WAN optimization products, and to have a confidential one-on-one conversation with that other customer.  When talking with that customer, ask about specifics such as the number and types of applications being optimized by the deployed products, number of users and locations in the customer's network,  and overall experience from using that vendor's products.  Make sure that the customer has a similarly complex network as your own, uses the same type of applications, and has deployed a similar number of devices that you anticipate deploying in your own network.

At Riverbed we expect and welcome any such requests for references.  With an installed base of over 12,000 customers, we have numerous Riverbed customers who would be happy to relay their experiences to you.  Unfortunately, that is not true for all vendors in this space.

Letting Others Do Our Job

I've worked for a bunch of different companies in my career in a variety of roles.  I have never worked for an organization where customers consistently demonstrate as much unbridled enthusiasm for a vendor's products as they do here at Riverbed.  No, not everything is 100% positive, and when there are negatives we work very hard to fix them.  Overall, though, customer response is remarkably positive, and when someone makes negative comments, customers often step in to respond to them before anyone from Riverbed has the chance to. And while we take the positive comments seriously, we take the negative ones far more seriously.

In a separate but related note, a big part of my job as Marketing Evangelist for Riverbed is to search various social media outlets for mentions, positive and negative, of Riverbed.  (As a tangential aside, when both the name of your company and the name of your flagship product are commonly-used nouns, it makes searching for mentions in social media extra-challenging.)

The point of this slightly rambling blog is that during our searches for mentions of Riverbed, we often find some terrific things being written about us in forums that we have absolutely nothing to do with.  (We also find terrific things in forums that we DO have things to do with...)  Here is a fine example:

In a forum called Spiceworks, you can find a discussion which includes the following totally unsolicited excerpt from a topic, written by a user who calls himself rhipkin:

We have just finished our Riverbed implementation. We are seeing improvements of up to 90% in some cases. We are confident of now removing servers from sites and bringing all data back to the head office to the data center.

Riverbed is solid and highly recommended.

Clearly this user has implemented Riverbed Steelhead appliances for WAN Optimization and may have also implemented the RSP (Riverbed Services Platform) to virtualize applications and servers that had been running at his branch offices, and has seen great success doing so.  And he's happy to share the information with the world.

I like to think that these people are on to something...

Autodesk University 2010

We're coming to you today from The Mandalay Bay Hotel Convention Center in Las Vegas, where we are attending Autodesk University 2010.  More precisely, we're working the booth on the Expo floor.  You can find us in booth #1622.  The expo started last night at 6pm when the doors were opened and the place filled with conference attendees.  This is an extremely well-attended conference with attendees from all over the world.

Riverbed WAN Optimization had been mentioned by name in a couple of the breakout sessions earlier in the day yesterday, and so we had a bunch of people stop by the booth who were not otherwise familiar with WAN Optimization.  Many of the questions we heard had to do with Autodesk's Revit Building Information Management software, and whether or not Steelhead appliances could speed up Revit activity across the WAN.  The answer is that we most definitely can.  We have documented results that show a 44x improvement in application performance and a 4-5x reduction in bandwidth.

The result is that you don't need local Revit servers in your branch offices to enable collaboration if you have Riverbed optimizing your WAN.  If you already do have branch office Revit servers, then you'll see a dramatic improvement in sync performance between the data center and the branch office's server.

Our friends and partners at Collaboration Systems Group, in booth #1623 (right behind our booth) are demonstrating the combination of Riverbed Steelhead appliances and Revit in their booth, and drawing quite a crowd.

If you're in town for Autodesk University, please make a point of stopping by the booth and saying hi.  We'd love to see you.

Riverbed and SAP

Eric Wolford, SVP Marketing and Business Development for Riverbed, discusses enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and SAP, the ERP application market leader.

See the video.

Eric then explains Riverbed's partnership with SAP, where we now supports SAP-specific technology.  This technology is developed on the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) which offers a hosted SAP instance on the Riverbed appliance while optimizing its performance.  This gives the end-user the perception the application is still local because application performance makes it feel like the application is on the LAN rather than across the WAN.  This capability enables enterprises to consolidate SAP servers to reduce costs but not the performance, while return of Investment (ROI) is typically recognized in under a year.

Riverbed Think Fast Demo: McAfee on RSP

Riverbed Named Q1 2010 Global Market Share Leader in WAN Optimization

Today Riverbed announced that it has been named by Gartner as the Q1 2010 market share leader in WAN optimization (the WOC Advanced Platform category).  In the same report, Riverbed was named the market share leader in the WOC category for 1Q 2010 based on revenue.

Q1 was a busy quarter for Riverbed from a product and technology standpoint as both consolidation and disaster recovery capabilities received a boost.

Riverbed enables additional IT consolidation opportunities by supporting branch office consolidation with the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP).

The RSP allows customers to create a branch office box (BOB) that can run up to five additional services or applications virtually in a protected partition on the Steelhead appliance. This approach allows customers to deploy a customized library of local services in all of their branch offices, without the need to deploy and maintain full-blown servers to run the applications. Riverbed has 14 qualified solutions on the RSP, including Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, and solutions from McAfee, Inc., Websense, Inc., Check Point® Software Technologies, Qumu, Infoblox Inc., and OPNET Technologies, Inc.

Whether an organization is focused on consolidating file servers, email servers, SAN or NAS devices, or remote tape backup libraries, Riverbed WAN optimization solutions will accelerate application performance, typically by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times, over the WAN, and reduce WAN bandwidth utilization, typically by 60 to 95%.

Riverbed WAN Optimization Accelerates Disaster Recovery Initiatives

During Q1 2010, Riverbed introduced the Steelhead 7050 model appliance to meet the performance, reliability and flexibility requirements of large enterprises. The Steelhead 7050 more cost-effectively manages large-scale data center-to-data center replication, accelerates applications across many locations and users in an enterprise, and allows organizations to build large private cloud infrastructures. This model combines new levels of throughput and connection scalability with solid-state drives (SSD) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) connectivity.
 
Riverbed WAN optimization solutions have been verified by Brocade Communications Systems Inc. as compatible with the Brocade 7500/FR4-18i Blade, according to the testing requirements of the Brocade Data Center Ready Program. In addition, Riverbed has partnerships with a variety of leading storage vendors, including Dell EqualLogic, Double-Take Software, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, NetApp and Symantec.
 
Most recently, Riverbed announced that as part of the EMC Select Program the company has been awarded the 2009 EMC® Partner Solution Award: Offering of the Year - Symmetrix®.

BT video spotlights WAN optimisation service based on Riverbed

BT recently posted a Virtual Expert video on AAI WOS (WAN Optimisation Service).  This is a great intro video that describes the BT offering that is based exclusively on Riverbed.  Another interesting note is that BT is not only a Riverbed partner, but also a customer as they use Riverbed internally for their WAN optimization needs.

You can access the video here http://www.globalservices.bt.com/gbl/en/page/aai_wan_virtual_expert

Riverbed in HP Procurve

HP Product Manager demonstrates Riverbed inside an HP Procurve.

Steelhead appliance

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

Branch Office Box

Faisal Memon demonstrates the Riverbed Services Platform, which provides the ability to run branch office services on a Steelhead appliance.

It’s (still) not just about bandwidth

It’s interesting to see how much has changed in the WAN (Wide Area Network) optimisation space over the last half a decade or more, yet some things haven’t changed much. Five years ago I recall a white paper had been written on the subject titled, “It’s not just about bandwidth”. At the time bandwidth reduction was a great story and the management reports within Steelhead were great at sharing how much bandwidth had been saved, but although some organisations were able to justify the business case on bandwidth alone many struggled. Saving bandwidth which gives rise to potential cost savings or as in most cases, defers bandwidth upgrades, is only part of the story and for most, a small part of the story. The real deal only happens as we speed up data across the WAN through either optimising the transport layer or better still accelerating the applications.

Now for some readers, this may not be anything new, it’s the bread and butter or simply put the basics of good solid WAN optimisation. But each week I am faced with questions from prospects & some journalists; with the advent of fibre everywhere, surely WAN optimisation struggles to add value right? Wrong!

Admittedly, if we run dark fibre from point A to point B over a relatively short distance and we connect our IT equipment at each end, with no service provider equipment in between then yes, WAN optimisation does not necessarily have a part. Bandwidth may be in plentiful supply but, more importantly, the biggest barrier to success across the WAN is latency and with dark fibre over a relative short distance the latency will be extremely low.

Today a number of service providers are upgrading their network to fibre only, offering much higher bandwidth options, in some cases up to 100Mbps and doing so cost effectively. This is great news for consumers and businesses, there’s no question about that but even with the almighty increase in bandwidth the latencies don’t go away over night. So if the issue is the speed of light, will increasing the bandwidth make the speed of light go faster? In short, no, as it still faces the same problems it did before. We can carry more traffic, hold more video conversations make more voice over IP calls and transfer larger files, but nothing goes any faster until we resolve the latency issue.

I recall a quote from Steve McCann, CTO of Riverbed Technology that was something like “The only way to overcome the speed of light is to not make the trip in the first place”. And it stands true today, more bandwidth is good, but once any bottlenecks have been overcome through either more bandwidth or a more efficient use of bandwidth the only way to make things go faster across your WAN is to optimise traffic leveraging technology such as the Riverbed optimisation system (RIOS).

So the idea that new fibre networks from service providers will provide more bandwidth is great, and I am sure technology development will improve for many, many years to come and continuingly increase in the phenomenon of more available bandwidth. But there is as much today as there was at the beginning of Riverbed and will be for many, many years to come a place for WAN optimisation technology as part of any IT infrastructure build to accelerate the data transferred across the WAN.

What do you think?

 

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