The Riverbed Blog

Introducing Steelhead CX, EX, and VSP

Senior Product Marketing Manager Joe Ghory provides an introduction to Riverbed's new Steelhead WAN optimization appliance platforms.

 

 

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 Introduces Suite of New Products and an Innovative Architectural Approach to Completely Consolidate IT

Every once in a while as a technology professional you get an opportunity to work on something disruptive.  This one is big. 

Today Riverbed introduced an architectural approach to consolidated IT known as edge virtual server infrastructure (Edge-VSI).  At the core of edge-VSI is Granite, a first of its kind edge server consolidation product.  

Edge-VSI does for edge servers outside of the data center what virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) did for desktops:  allow IT to consolidate edge servers in the data center, without impacting application performance at the edge.  To enable this approach, Riverbed introduces Granite, which allows organizations to consolidate servers and storage from edge locations to the data center, yet project the data to the edge of the enterprise as if it were local. 

This innovation decouples storage from compute delivering the best of all worlds:  100% consolidation and control of data while delivering LAN-like performance of applications at the edge.  All at up to 50% of the costs of traditional, distributed infrastructure.

In addition to Granite, Riverbed introduced two new Steelhead product series: 

•  Steelhead CX  - a series of dedicated WAN optimization appliances for the WAN optimization enthusiast

•  Steelhead EX - an enterprise-class branch office appliance series featuring WAN optimization and a VMware virtualization hypervisor for the consolidation enthusiast

Both Steelhead CX and Steelhead EX appliances have more resources (CPU, memory) and deliver more impressive specifications (throughput, TCP connections) than previous models.  Enjoy!

Riverbed announces Cascade 9.5

Today, Riverbed announced Cascade 9.5 and Virtual Cascade Shark, which will provide customers with the needed visibility into load-balanced and virtualized data centers, and extend end-to-end performance monitoring and troubleshooting deeper into the data center. Other key new capabilities with Cascade 9.5 include multi-segment analysis, precision timestamp support, and VoIP quality reporting – all adding to deeper visibility for more accurate analysis and troubleshooting for delivering performance. 

Press release is here and below is a podcast discussion covering the 9.5 update.

 

 

 

Join Riverbed at AFCEA West 2012

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

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

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

 

Blog Battle: Why public cloud is the future of IT

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

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

Let the Blog Battle begin!

Why public cloud is the future of IT

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riverbed Technical Leader Steve Riley Q&A on Distributed Recentralization

Thank you for tuning in to the Federal IT Q&A series with Steve Riley, our friend for all things cloud. With this episode, we're wrapping up the series with one question and one answer. 

The question: what does the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, Cloud First policy, data protection, mobility and telework, and desktop virtualization, have in common?

The answer: Distributed recentralization. In the below video, Steve provides a history on the computing models we've experienced (i.e., mainframe, client-server and centralized computing), and talks about the direction we're moving towards - distributed recentralization. The trend is that we're moving to fewer but larger data centers. And, compared to centralized computing (creation, access and process happening in one place), with distributed decentralization, access and creation are happening in one place, and processing and storage are happening in another place. Also, with fewer data centers, these two activities are occurring at even greater distances in the past ten years. 

This is why adding a layer of intelligence to networks is critical.

 

Actually, there is one more question. What topics — within the realm of IT performance — would you like to see from us?  

 

Stingray Traffic Manager Overview Video

Owen Garrett, Director of Product Management for Riverbed's Stingray line of asymmetric optimization products, provides an overview of the Stingray Traffic Manager.

 

 

Introducing the Stingray Product Family

Apurva Dave, Riverbed VP of Marketing, provides an introduction to Stingray, which is Riverbed's new line of asymmetric optimization products.

 

You can also read the press release here

Riverbed Technical Leader Steve Riley Q&A on Desktop Virtualization

For this week's Federal IT Q&A with Steve Riley, we examine the considerations for agencies looking to deploy desktop virtualization, the associated considerations, the drivers, user behaviors, applications, as well as how Riverbed solutions play a critical role in ensuring the best possible user experience. 

To kick things off, Steve breaks it down about what are some of the drivers for VDI. Simply put, the consumerization of IT is high on the list. An agency can allow agents to bring in their own gear, or purchase -- with a budget -- gear, and then provide and manage a virtual desktop with applications securely. From an IT and budgetary perspective, desktop virtualization allows agencies to not have to purchase devices, manage and refresh them.

Virtual desktop is also truly enabling the dual use personal-professional device. And, as you may expect, iPads and Android-based tablets are the devices of choice. But, the beauty of VDI is it is device independent.

So, what is the Riverbed play? How is Riverbed accelerating virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)? Earlier this year, we announced continued and enhanced support for Citrix XenDesktop. At around the same time, we announced an optimization solution for Microsoft RemoteFX. And, at VMworld in the summer, we announced an upcoming partnership with Teradici, the innovator of the PC-over-IP protocol. Clearly a lot of developments around VDI with more to come.  

If you have been keeping count, then you'll know that we're approaching the end of the Federal IT Q&A series with Riverbed technical leader Steve Riley. Next week, tune in for a recap and finale discussion on how everything we discussed (data center consolidation, cloud computing, data protection, mobility and teleworking, and desktop virtualization) is tied together. 

But for now, watch the below video Q&A with Steve.

 

 

McAfee Focus 2011

Fresh off a fun and successful Interop New York last week, I go back on the road next week to McAfee Focus 2011 in Las Vegas.  There we will be showcasing the latest in Riverbed Technology including your favorite McAfee products running seamlessly on the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP).  RSP allows you to run up five additional services and applications on your Steelhead Appliance, turning it into a true Branch Office in a Box. 

McAfee Web Gateway and McAfee Firewall Enterprise are two such applications that run on RSP.  With McAfee Web Gateway you get the #1 rated anti-malware solution for Web 2.0 threats.  With McAfee Firewall Enterprise you get a next-generation firewall designed to give you protection and control over your network.  And with RSP you can deploy these solutions on your Steelhead Appliance, no additonal hardware needed.

Look for the Riverbed Technology booth at the McAfee Focus 2011 conference from October 18-20, 2011.

Riverbed in Austin, Texas at Dell World 2011

If you plan to attend Dell World from October 12–14 in Austin, Texas, then come and visit the Riverbed booth to learn about Riverbed and Dell solutions that enable customers to optimize the performance of their IT infrastructure.

As businesses, from SMB to large enterprises, continue to innovate the way they do business and adopt leading solutions for virtualization and cloud, CIOs are examining cost-effective technologies to satisfy their requirements. Moving data and applications to the cloud, data center to data center replication and disaster recovery are all key initiatives affected by virtualization and cloud computing.

Riverbed and Dell have been collaborating as strategic partners to bring IT performance solutions to customers. Specifically, Riverbed Steelhead products with Dell EqualLogic storage help optimize WAN-based iSCCI data replication. Have a read at the solution brief here. And, Riverbed Steelhead with Dell Compellent storage, delivers accelerated disaster recovery operations and increased data protection. Read more in the Compellent and Riverbed solution brief.

How are have customers deployed Riverbed and Dell, together? Here are some customer examples, from Minnwest Bank and Constangy, Brooks, & Smith, LLP.

 

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 Challenges with Mobility and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

As a commuter heading into San Francisco on BART for the past several years,  I feel as though I have actually witnessed a revolution. 

Just a few years ago, the common commuter either slept, read (books, newspapers, magazines), or stared in the distance.  Occasionally someone might take or make a call, or possibly send a text or two (I loved my nokia 8210, so small!).  

Today, however, the most common pose is a near constant stare at our smart phones or connected device.

I’m as guilty as the next person, pounding away updates on my Blackberry.  But the behavioral change is fascinating to me. Will it always  be like this?  Is this just a phase or are we forever committing to our screens?

Sidestepping the discussion about whether or not you think smartphones actually make us dumb, the proliferation of devices has got me thinking about the impact these devices have on IT. 

The challenge of mobile devices was particularly evident at an event I attended a few weeks ago, it was a customer advisory council meeting for a very successful regional value added reseller (VAR) in the Southeast.  The company had assembled 15 of their top customers to discuss best practices and new technologies.

By a show of hands, the greatest challenge the group faced was the explosion of end user devices and the impact the devices were having on corporate networks and on IT support.  One attendee discussed how their organization had gone so far to embrace end user choice that their company actually issues a hardware/device stipend to all new employees rather than supplying a laptop or desktop. The end user could buy the laptop, phone or pad of their choice, while IT focused on providing support and making sure their networks could handle surging amounts of traffic.

All this lead to a very lengthy discussion about Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) - (you can find some very honest and comprehensive discussions about VDI here).  VDI is a topic near and dear to Riverbed customers since at the core of the VDI concept is the explicit separation of end users from their data. And as we’ve learned from client-server applications that run over wide area networks, any time you separate end users from their data, especially over great distances, performance can really suffer, and WAN optimization technology is required to deliver the level of performance users demand.

Based on some partner and customer research I conducted earlier this year, I found that today’s most successful VDI deployments take place on local area networks (LAN), often deployed in a single facility or campus.  Education, Government agencies, and various types of financial service companies are particularly attracted to VDI’s promise of controlled, single instance data.  And while early desktop virtualization pitches promoted the cost benefits of VDI, many studies have since shown the cost benefits are minimal.  The real primary attraction of VDI is the age-old IT attraction of centralized control.

However, the challenge of VDI is most evident is over wide area networks (WAN).  If you’ve ever been frustrated by a pause in sending an e-mail or opening an application in a traditional corporate office, try sitting across a WAN from your data on a dumb terminal when you begin to experience slow or inconsistent K..EY..S.T…ROKE..S, forget it, it’s the worst. VDI over the WAN is a real challenge, which is why Riverbed is spending so much time and energy on the subject.  Today, we already optimize the Citrix ICA protocol and we help our customers optimize VMware view deployments as well using RDP optimization. 

During his keynote at Citrix Synergy in May, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton discussed a future where users would enjoy device and network independence.  I think we’re still a ways off from that, but I’m certain Riverbed will help the world get there. 

And for all my fellow BART commuters staring at your phones, just be thankful there are companies like Riverbed hard at work optimizing your corporate and public networks so you don’t miss a post, tweet, blog, text, request e-mail, video….

Did you know Worldwide smart phone shipments increased 87% in the last 12 months

 

Riverbed's Optimization Solutions for the Cloud

Recently I saw a blog post on ReadWriteWeb / Cloud by David Strom where he described the roles that WAN Optimization can play in helping accelerate Cloud-based IT services.

This has long been an area of attention at Riverbed; for years now we have been helping Enterprises address and solve the challenges they've faced with business applications performing poorly across their private WANs. Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead family of WAN Optimization appliances have held a leading position in the global market for the last several years, according to several leading industry analyst firms.

Now, in the era of Cloud-based IT services, the performance problems created by the increased distance between users and their data, combined with the lack of QoS and un-guaranteed internet performance are significantly worse than those faced within a structured and well-known corporate IT environment. Thus the need for performance optimization in these cloud environments is even greater than in traditional, private corporate IT.

These requirements have prompted Riverbed to develop and offer a whole range of products and technologies, to address the vast majority of Cloud-based IT applications and environments. In his recent blog post,  David mentioned only one Riverbed product in this context, the Steelhead Appliance.  

In addition to this though Riverbed also has the following products available to address the Acceleration & Optimization needs of virtual and cloud environments :

1. Virtual Steelhead - as the name suggests, a virtual version of the Steelhead product that can be run on VMWare ESX/ESXi platforms
2. Cloud Steelhead - Steelhead WAN Optimization + simple portal-based management, On-demand instantiation, easy cloning, fliexible sizing and pricing
3. Riverbed Whitewater - a single-ended Cloud Storage Gateway that delivers speed, security, cost-efficiency and ease of use for Cloud-based storage services and of course
4. Steelhead Mobile - PC and MAC client acceleration software, so you can enjoy accelerated cloud IT services from anywhere, over any connectivity medium.

Additionally with the recent acquisition of both Zeus and Aptimize, Riverbed now also has two new Single-Ended technologies - Application Delivery Controller and Web Content Optimization - to help accelerate  both public and private cloud-based web content and applications.

So in summary, Riverbed really should be your first port of call for any cloud IT service acceleration & optimization requirements.

Your 3AM friend

It’s 3am, you are putting the finishing touches on your latest deployment of a virtual appliance via Riverbed Services Platform, and your shining glory is Checkpoint Firewall in a remote branch.  You’re going to sleep much better at night knowing that your little branch computers are sleeping safe at night with a big bad firewall protecting it.  You have the firewall running, you are able to ping the management interface, and you are preparing to put the device inline, but.... 

You think, “if I put the firewall inline, how am I going to put both interfaces in at the same time.  I sure am glad I thought about this because I was just about to blackhole this site.”  Now you think to yourself, how am I going to get this firewall inline, without being behind the firewall?

Well, your 3am friend is the job command.  Job is a CLI command that invokes the Scheduler within the Steelhead.  There isn’t a GUI equivalent for this, but don’t be scared, this is an easy command to master.  The syntax of the jobs command is as follows:

sh#(config)job number command number “command”

sh#(config)job number date-time hh:mm:ss

One of the biggest benefits of the job command is that it runs locally, and it will run multiple commands from a single command line entry.  So in our example we would have to run two commands to put a virtual server inline on RSP.  So the command sequence that we would execute would be:

sh#(config) job 1 command 1 “rsp dataflow inpath0_0 add opt-vni vniname_lan_interface_first vni-num end”

sh#(config)job 1 command 2 “rsp dataflow inpath0_0 add opt-vni vniname_wan_interface_last vni-num end”

sh#(config)job 1 enable

Let’s review what we just did.  The first job command inserts the LAN side interface into the virtual network data flow, and the second command inserts the WAN side interface, the third job enables the job for execution. 

To actually run the job we’ll issue:

sh#job 1 execute

One of my other favorite uses for the job command is to create time-based QoS.  In the particular instance that is coming to mind, I had a client that needed to limit replication traffic on a shared link during the day, but after 6pm, they wanted it to run full on.  At 7am they wanted to return bandwidth restrictions.  Using job, I was able to create a QoS rule that activated at 6pm and then returned back to a restricted state at the prescribed time.

So the next time you're up at 3am, get your friend to do the job, so you can get some sleep!

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!

Nobel Prizes and Cloud Steelhead

What do the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics and the launch of Cloud Steelhead 1.1 have in common?  

Both are seminal achievements that are much easier to understand than they may otherwise seem.  While the result of dragging scotch tape through pencil shavings earned the Two Russian-born scientists the sciences greatest honor, Cloud Steelhead has the ability to earn you a similar distinction within your organization. 

With this release Cloud Steelhead adds compatibility for ESX-based public cloud environments and extends cloud partner ecosystem.  

Cloud Steelhead now offers validated technical compatibility with a number of cloud service providers, including Terremark, ZettaServe and Xtium, as well as solution technology partners CloudSwitch and Media Platform. These companies join Amazon EC2 and VPC as part of the wide ecosystem of cloud services supported by Cloud Steelhead.

Just as Alfred Nobel made his name with a BANG, Cloud Steelhead can be just as impactful on your cloud infrastructure, by speeding your migration to and performance from the cloud for all of the applications you run from Amazon Web Services or other ESX based enviornments.  Just think, all of these benefits, without that pesky trip to Sweden....

XenDesktop at the Speed of Now

Today Riverbed announced the expansion of our abilities to accelerate and control the broadest range of virtual desktop environments over the WAN.  We are adding enhanced support for Citrix XenDesktop joining our existing coverage for the virtual desktop solutions from leading providers like Microsoft and VMware. Customers who deploy Steelhead products in a virtual desktop environment are able to overcome the WAN performance issues that bottleneck virtual desktop deployments, significantly enhancing virtual desktop end-user productivity and helping speed the adoption of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).  This announcement is particularly important in light of the many recent developments we’ve seen in the VDI space.    

The convergence of a number of trends in the server and OS market are propelling an increased interest in desktop virtualization.  The enormous success that server virtualization projects have had at helping customers achieve the promised benefits of greater flexibility, lower costs, and improved data management have driven rapid growth in the space as well as increased interest in identifying other opportunities to realize these benefits.  Server virtualization vendors have made significant improvements in their desktop virtualization products, committing more resources and attention on them to eliminate legacy concerns regarding functionality and performance.  The increased focus by vendors on desktop virtualization meets a surge demand for OS and client systems as organizations have anointed Windows 7 as the true successor to XP and have initiated refresh cycles.  With a total addressable market of 35 million servers vs 370-600 million enterprise desktops these contravening forces suggest continued growth in this space along with corresponding increases in emphasis by product and solution vendors. 

The primary challenges limiting the adoption of VDI are similar to the challenges of centralized architectures: application performance and bandwidth utilization.  VDI products are particularly susceptible to this as poor responsiveness typically manifests itself not merely as slow application performance but also impacts higher priority tasks leading to sluggish mouse movements and keystrokes.  Additionally, recommendations of up to 256k of bandwidth per user session, which are typically both compressed and encrypted, levies a significant bandwidth tax for usage and also limits the ability for third party technologies to try to ensure quality of service and performance.

Riverbed plays a central role-enabling server centralization and virtualization projects and is well positioned to leverage this success in the desktop virtualization space.   One of the Steelhead products' key differentiators is the ability to optimize across applications and protocols.  That is particularly valuable as organizations rely on their networks to support multiple applications and uses.  This versatility is relevant to VDI as users often run additional applications and services outside of their network stream. 

In addition, Riverbed provides additional benefits to VDI deployments by addressing the inherent difficulties of performance and bandwidth utilization in the virtual desktop stream.  This functionality enhances software solutions from major vendor including Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp, VMware View, Microsoft RDP and RemoteFX.  By addressing the fundamental limitations of virtual desktops across vendors while also providing optimization for all other traffic on the WAN, Riverbed is strongly positioned to promote its solution in the virtual desktop space.

Distributed recentralization: Networks to eleven!

It's a sunny Friday morning here in Seattle. (No, really.) On these rare times when prodigious quantities of warmth and light stream through the large south and east windows of my house, it's easy to let the daily fray subside for a bit and reflect on larger trends. Lately, I've noticed some interesting connections between cloud computing and user-centric IT.

A colleague recently spotted a couple articles that piqued my curiosity. In The virtual desktop: Everything old is new again, CRN's Edward Corriea describes how virtualization's initial appearance on mainframes faded away like an old pair of jeans, only to come back in fashion later: first on commodity x86 hardware and then as one of the core components of cloud computing. Next up is desktop virtualization, or VDI. Edward cites VDI's intense I/O requirements as one of the main shortfalls of large-scale VDI deployments. So many virtual clients, each performing profligate I/O itself, create a "VM I/O blender" on the physical hardware: constant random I/O kills disk performance.

In InformationWeek's 2011 End-user Device Survey, Jonathan Feldman chronicles the ongoing consumerization of corporate IT. Provocatively, he wonders whether it makes sense to hang on to the traditional corporate desktop. Android tablets and VDI are both making gains, he writes; yet fat desktops trapped in three-year replacement cycles and tied to expensive PC leases remain prevalent. Not everything is so gloomy, though. SaaS subscriptions are way up and for some organizations speed now trumps features: he's seeing tradeoff of screen size for portability. Jonathan's data show that organizations are now readying for true VDI, too. He goes on to describe how to free up IT funds to support comprehensive mobile device management, including the burgeoning BYOD ("bring your own device") movement. Jonathan concludes with sage advice: "The end user device paradigm shift offers significant opportunities for business technology innovation, but you'll miss out if you're purely focusing on span of control and defensive IT."

Reading these articles reminded me about a presentation on virtualization security I delivered at Microsoft TechEd a few years ago. I began that talk, as I frequently do, with a short retrospective. The "operating system" running on that hulking PC you bought in the late 1980s didn't have a whole lot to worry about: how much damage can one user running one application really cause? Eventually the operating system had to mature: first to enforce application boundaries so that multitasking would work, then to enforce user boundaries so that multiple people could share a computer. When hardware became powerful enough, software technology shifted: a hypervisor along with a finely-tuned host OS enforced guest OS boundaries so that multiple environments could share a server. A simple visual progression of these trust boundaries might look like this:

At this point, you might be wondering: "What's this got to do with user-centric IT and, wait, doesn't Riverbed sell network stuff?" Let me link these seemingly disparate elements together.

Virtualization is, of course, one of the fundamental technologies that underlie cloud -- providers can crank resource utilization to 11.  But a funny thing happened along the way to the user-centric IT concert: while the cloud offers seemingly infinite compute and storage, people learned the bandwidth to get there isn't all unicorns and rainbows. That phone or tablet of yours is a full-fledged computer, roomy and always connected. It's likely to be your primary means of accessing (and secondary means of storing) work-related stuff. The trends Edward and Jon highlight -- more VDI, more BYOD, more SaaS, more mobility -- all require network capacities that are expensive to build out and bump into inconvenient laws of physics.

We're entering an era I call distributed recentralization. As I ponder the simultaneous emergence of cloud computing and the move toward IT consumerization, it occurs to me that each one contributes to the sudden and continual growth of the other. We humans are creating and consuming massive amounts of data every day, a lot of it with consumer-type devices. Much of that information gets sent to and redistributed from the cloud. All this activity puts enormous pressures on network links -- pressures that often can't be overcome just by buying a bigger pipe.

We're passionate about WANs at Riverbed. WANs allow people to create, access, store, and compute information wherever it's convenient to do so -- frequently at distance. Our expanding product line enables you to be as creative as you can be without worrying about network or storage constraints. Cloud and consumerization certainly don't imply that IT will become a commodity; indeed, the information an organization possess, and how it manipulates and shares that information, truly are competitive differentiators. Let us help you crank your differentiation to 11.

How VDI will break service provider offerings

I had a fascinating presentation and discussion with a Riverbed customer yesterday. He’s the cloud computing architect for a global manufacturing company, with about 40 locations worldwide. One fact of note is that their entire organization runs on VDI – that’s impressive in and of itself. But what was more interesting to me is that he believes all service providers are currently at least 5 years behind in enabling him to run VDI the way he wants to. In short – he believes service providers are broken when it comes to the next wave of distributed computing.

The architect used a couple of great parallelisms that couldn’t help but make the topic stick in your mind. First – look at the last wave of traffic to move onto the wire – voice. In many cases it was massively challenging for organizations to engineer their environments to support voice effectively throughout – especially if you were including very remote sites or locations that used public internet or satellite as their connection. In the beginning he argued much of this happened through organizations engineering around service providers, instead of with service providers. (Full disclaimer – these are the claims of the customer, not of Riverbed or myself!)

At the time, voice was the essential communication mechanism that could not fail. People frequently spent hours a day on the phone, so both quality and reliability were essential. But another interesting phenomenon happened along the way – the cell phone. Somehow the world at large was OK with going backwards in quality and reliability (does the phrase “Can you hear me now?” sound familiar?). For the enterprise, why was that acceptable? The customer posited two reasons – for one, the benefit of mobility was a productivity enhancer, but two, the phone was simply no longer as important as your interaction with your computer.

For a knowledge worker like myself, this couldn’t be any truer. On a busy day I might spend 1-2 hours on the phone. The rest of the time I’m probably doing something with my computer. In fact, in many cases when I’m on the phone I’m on the computer too! I could much more easily survive without telephone communications than I could survive without computer access in general.

And now back to VDI. For our customer, he discovered two major problems with regards to how he uses his network today. His service provider has difficulty separating out “real-time traffic” like voice from “interactive traffic” like VDI, where intense back-and-forth WAN communications could massively limit the effectiveness of a worker. Moreover, it’s not just downtime that would affect him, but even high latency would drive losses of a few hundred thousand dollars per hour, per office. And since his service provider only reports average latency for the past month, he’s out of luck in terms of proactively addressing the problem.

The other challenge he has is, in some way, to model the way transitioning to VDI or making changes to your setup will impact your end user experience. For example, if you switch to Windows 7 virtual desktops it’s likely that the bandwidth required per session will go up about 40%. It’s easy to say how much network capacity you’ll require based on number of users, but how will a blip in latency impact the user experience? Will it change on Windows 7 versus other platforms?

Technology is going in the right direction – though the architect needs to see it move faster. For example, he can use Steelhead appliances today in order to prioritize VDI traffic above everything else, even voice and video. But the ability to effectively and scalably model the user experience of VDI is a hurdle that he has not been able to overcome, beyond simply making his users or staff sit at a desk, and spend time testing software instead of closing business.

I would be interested in hearing from others – do you have the tools that you need to implement VDI across your distributed environment? 

 

Hello, Riverbed world!

Good day, everyone. Following Evan’s recent announcement about adding more voices to the Riverbed blog, I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself. I’m Steve Riley, recently joining Riverbed’s Strategic Technology Group—the same team to which Josh Tseng, a regular blogger here, belongs. I came to Riverbed from Amazon Web Services, where as a technical evangelist I helped customers understand how to solve the sometimes confusing problems around security, privacy, and compliance in the cloud. Before that I was at Microsoft, where for a time I worked in the telecommunications and security practices of Microsoft Consulting Services and mostly in the Trustworthy Computing Group as public speaker, customer advisor, author of several articles, and co-author of a Windows security book.

I’m thrilled to join the community of Riverbed employees, customers, and partners. Riverbed isn’t a new name to me; when people would ask for my opinions of how to squeeze the most out of their expensive network connections, Riverbed was the obvious choice and I’d recommend Steelhead consistently. While I thoroughly enjoyed my years of working to help others protect their networks and fight the bad guys, it feels good to return to my networking roots and be a part of the company truly revolutionizing the foundation of the 21^st century: constant connectivity.

Among other fun and challenging things, part of my role at Riverbed is to assist you, our current (and future) customers, derive maximum value from virtualization and cloud computing. Enterprise adoption of the cloud will happen—indeed, for many enterprises, the verb should be is already happening. Cloud Steelhead, in conjunction with Steelhead appliances in regional offices and Steelhead Mobile for road warriors, enable businesses to fundamentally rebuild themselves. Location matters: if you can live and work closer to your customers yet still communicate with your colleagues as easily as if you were in the office, do you really need a massive central headquarters nowadays? (I have many ideas here and will share them with you over time.) Whitewater wipes out the drudgery of backups and gives you the assurance that all of your data is preserved multiple times in multiple distinct physical locations.

At Riverbed we love pushing networks to their limits. Let us take care of quickly and safely moving and storing your critical information so that you can concentrate on the business of your business. My role is customer-facing; I look forward to meeting many of you in person soon. In the meantime, or at any time, feel free to reach out to me directly at steve.riley@riverbed.com.

Cloud Steelhead and the Public Cloud

 
 
Riverbed customers have been using their Steelheads in private clouds for a number of years now.  Since private cloud infrastructures are dedicated to a single user organization, it's usually not a big deal to physically install a Steelhead appliance behind the router or to configure WCCP in the switches supporting the private cloud.

However, the public cloud is a different matter.  Public cloud users can install their own software applications on into the Cloud, but they lack access to the underlying network infrastructure supporting the public cloud.  Without this access, it's not possible to deploy physical Steelheads into the public cloud network, or to configure WCCP in the switches in order to re-direct traffic to Steelhead software deployed in virtual machines. 

To address this challenge, Riverbed recently introduced Cloud Steelhead, the first and only solution that is specifically designed to deliver WAN optimization services to the public cloud.  Cloud Steelhead is one of two new products introduced by Riverbed in the past month (the other being Riverbed Whitewater).  Unlike other WAN optimization products, Cloud Steelhead can be deployed into a public cloud without configuration changes in the underlying network infrastructure supporting that cloud environment.  Once deployed, these Cloud Steelheads can communicate with Steelhead appliances at the customer's location or Steelhead mobile software clients installed on employee laptops to deliver fast LAN-like performance to public cloud applications.

The Riverbed innovation that makes this possible is the Discovery Agent, which allows traffic to be transparently re-directed to Cloud Steelheads without WCCP, PBR, or physical in-path deployment of the Steelheads.  The Discovery Agent also provides clustering, load balancing, and high availability/failover for WAN optimization services delivered by the Cloud Steelheads--the same capabilities that Riverbed customers enjoy in their private cloud and enterprise Steelhead deployments.

A final key component of Cloud Steelhead is the Riverbed Portal, an online resource used by Riverbed customers to deploy, manage, and monitor their Cloud Steelheads within the public cloud. After logging in to the Riverbed Portal, Riverbed customers activate or extend the Cloud Steelhead licenses that they have purchased from their Riverbed reseller.  The Riverbed Portal also provides detailed central reporting information on the health and status of their Cloud Steelheads.

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...

CRN interviews Jerry Kennelly & Eric Wolford

Over at crn.com there's an interview with Riverbed's CEO Jerry Kennelly and our SVP of Marketing and Business Development Eric Wolford.  They talk about the competitiveness of the WAN Optimization market, the inevitably of cloud computing, and Riverbed's plans for the future.

Check it out here.

3 more Interop NYC 2010 videos

Riverbed's VP of Product Marketing, Apurva Dave, took part in a panel discussion on WAN Optimization and Virtualization in the Branch office at Interop 2010 in New York City last week. 

First, Apurva spoke for about 10 minutes..

 

Then the panel discussion began.  (It's in two parts due to YouTube limits.)  The second part ends with a short commentary by Apurva of how the panel discussion went.

 

 

Riverbed Think Fast Demo: McAfee on RSP

Demo Video: How fast is Virtual Steelhead compared to the Steelhead appliance?

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

Steelhead appliance

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

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.

How is virtualization like Walmart?

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

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!

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.

Virtualizing Networks

Denise Dubie's blog in Network World makes some interesting observations on virtualization technology.  Recently-available and widely-deployed technologies have made it easy virtualize servers, storage, and desktop resources.  Server virtualization has allowed one managed server to deliver the capabilities of multiple servers.  Storage virtualization and thin provisioning allow us to obtain more storage utilization out of a given physical amount of storage capacity. And of course, desktop virtualization allows one physical workstation to access multiple virtual desktops.

According to Denise, the network hasn't received much attention in the area of virtualization yet.  But she further states that "...the network will emerge from behind the scenes to command center stage and play a pivotal role in tomorrow's virtualized environments."

I agree with Denise's observations and projections, but I propose that her "tomorrow" is already happening today.  Today, more than 4500 Riverbed customers are getting virtualized performance and throughputs through their WAN infrastructure.  Let me show you what I mean...

Riverbed goes Virtual with VMware

One of the big news items of the day is the announced partnership between Riverbed and VMware and how Riverbed will be providing VMware's virtual platform as the base for running branch office services directly on Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead appliance.

Some of you may be asking why would I want to run services on a device that was designed to accelerate applications over the WAN?

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.

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