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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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?
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.
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.