The Riverbed Blog

Demo of Riverbed's Performance Platform

This short demo covers Riverbed's Cascade, Stingray Traffic Manager, Stingray Aptimizer, Steelhead / Akamai SaaS acceleration, and Whitewater products through the lens of Microsoft SharePoint.

 

Extending Stingray Traffic Manager with TrafficScript

One of my duties as a Channel System Engineer is to update our partners on our new technologies and products. In the recent months after people heard that we acquired two new outstanding technologies, I was often asked why believe that the Zeus ADC now Stingray Traffic Manager is superior to other ADCs on the market.

Of course there are many different correct answers to this question. But for me one of the main reasons is its flexibility, scalability and of course the fact that it is highly customizable, making it a solution that is easy to adapt to all the customer scenarios out there.

For those who might have missed it: Stingray Traffic Manager is a high-availability, application-centric traffic management and load balancing virtual ADC. It provides control, intelligence, security and resilience for all application traffic. Stingray Traffic Manager is intended for organizations hosting valuable business-critical services, such as TCP and UDP-based services like HTTP (web) and media delivery, and XML-based services such as Web Services.

Stingray Traffic Manager’s architecture ensures it can handle large volumes of network traffic efficiently. Its scalability allows you to add more front-end traffic managers or back-end servers as the need arises. The cluster size is unlimited, and the performance of the traffic manager grows in line with the performance of the underlying hardware.

These are all amazing features Stingray TM provides for scalabilty and felxibilty, but today I would like to talk specifically about one of the capabilities of the Stingray Traffic Manager that extends the possibilities mentioned above and makes it highly adaptable beyond what would be achievable with a monolithic approach: TrafficScript.

Using the TrafficScript language you can write tailored traffic management rules to inspect, manage and route requests and responses in every imaginable way.

TrafficScript rules can be executed whenever a new connection or network request is received, and whenever it receives a response from a node. The rules you create inspect the incoming and outgoing data in the connection, and other aspects such as  e.g. the remote client address, destination address and port. You can write rules that can then modify the request or response (for example, rewriting the URL or headers in an HTTP request), set session persistence parameters, or decide how to route the request or even rewrite the content of the output page.

 

 

There are many occasions when you might want to use a TrafficScript rule.:

• You can use a rule to dictate session persistence information

• Rules can be used to check the response from the server and modify it, or even retry the request (if possible) if a transient error was detected.

•  If you use various back-end systems with different presentation styles or even different protocols, rules can be used to integrate them into a single, coherent and consistent service. Incoming requests can be rewritten into the format suitable for the required service, and responses can be rewritten into a single, consistent form.  For example, HTTP requests that involve a database lookup can be rewritten into SOAP request for a Web Service; the XML response can then be transformed into a suitable HTML document to return via HTTP.

• Rules can specify custom behavior for each connection; e.g. connections to a slow resource can be given a longer response time tolerance for example.

• Security:  You can use a rule to check packets for a match with known web worms or viruses.

• Data Protection: you can write rules that ensure that sensitive data like credit card numbers or social security numbers are automatically hidden even if they were to be displayed in the output of a web page by accident.

 

One of the great properties of TrafficScript is that it is easy to learn and understand! Even for people with little coding experience. You don’t have to worry about having to learn an entirely new, complicated scripting language, TrafficScript will look familiar even to the untrained eye.

 

Here are two examples of TrafficScript rules:

 

1) Restricting Access Based on the Time of Day

This example only allows access to a particular service during office hours (between 9am and 6pm, Monday to Friday). It discards all connections that occur outside these times.

$dayofweek = sys.time.weekDay();

$hourofday = sys.time.hour();

# $dayofweek: Sunday is 1, Saturday is 7

# $hourofday: office hours are between 9am and 5:59pm if( $dayofweek == 1 ||

    $dayofweek == 7 ||

    $hourofday < 9  ||

$hourofday >= 18 ) {

  log.warn( "Warning: access out of hours!" );

  connection.discard();

}

 

2) Customer Prioritization

This example inspects the cookie in an HTTP request. It uses the value of the cookie to determine which pool to direct the request to. One pool is faster than the other because it contains machines that are reserved for premium users.

A company has a customer base divided into “gold” and “silver” membership. It wishes to give priority to the “gold” customers and has five servers, yellow, green, blue, black and purple.

Two server pools are created: standard, for the “silver” customers, containing machines yellow, green and blue; and premium, for the “gold” customers, which includes all five of the servers. Thus black and purple are only available to the “gold” customers.

 

 

The site uses a cookie login system, with the customer type encoded in the cookie. Different membership levels can be detected, and sent to the correct pool.  This is the script needed to achieve this:

$cookie = http.getHeader( "cookie" );

if( string.contains( $cookie, "gold" )) {

   pool.use( "premium" );

} else {

   pool.use( "standard" );

}

5 short lines of code to ensure that your premium customers get the best possible service!

 

These two short examples  show that TrafficScript is indeed a very approachable, easy to learn scripting language. The best part is: our outstanding Support Team will assist you if you have problems writing or adaptig your own TrafficScripts.

This is part of your support contract and ensures that there is someone around to help you at all times at no extra cost.

For a detailed overview and syntax  to get you started, take a look at our Stingray Traffic Manager TrafficScript Guide.

Of course there is also a community of TrafficScript Users that can help you with your first (and further) steps. Visit them  at http://community.riverbed.com/t5/Stingray-Family/ct-p/zeusproducts  for code samples, answers to your questions and further documentation.

 

 

 

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.

 

Slow… SharePoint? Stingray Aptimizer to the Rescue!

Jessica Safiari, Riverbed PR specialist, recently had a creative bug spurred by a triple shot of the recent SharePoint Conference, our Stingray announcement, and possibly from watching too many reruns of Superman films. Either way, enjoy the below short story.   

At the end of the annual Microsoft SharePoint conference, bloggers and journalists came away with the idea of ‘transition’ for the Web-based application. Regardless of the SharePoint changes to come, organizations need to accelerate the application now.

Picture this… It’s a dark, lonely night at the office, and Steve Hairpoint is working late to prepare for the biggest sales meeting of his career. “One more piece of competitive analysis data and I’m calling it a night,” he thought as he logged onto SharePoint. His keystrokes echo in the silent building. He waits for the application to open. The clock ticks slowly. One minute… Two minutes… And then finally, it loads. Tired and frustrated, Steve continues his work. After another half-hour of painfully slow searches for the information he needs, Steve called it quits.

We’ve all been there: working hard on a project and the Web-based application is not cooperating.  When people are forced to wait, the loss of time can be detrimental to potential business opportunities. And in this challenging economy, every opportunity could make or break the organization’s bottom line. Additionally, it is frustrating and impacts user behavior. We invest in these awesome Web-based applications; and sometimes they choke like someone is asking their secret crush on a first date, becoming almost unusable and in a sense reducing employee productivity. 

Luckily, Web-based applications, like SharePoint, now have a superhero to rescue them from the twin perils of heavy weight inefficient content and network limitations like latency. The name is Riverbed Stingray Aptimizer for SharePoint. If Stingray Aptimizer had its own television series, the intro would be:

Stingray Aptimizer laughs in the face of latency as he sits on the web server, boldly accelerating applications and websites, freeing all Web-based applications, like SharePoint from lag time. With Stingray Aptimizer, SharePoint and intranet response times are lightning fast. How can Stingray Aptimizer accomplish such a great feat? The amazing powers of Stingray Aptimizer reduces page load times, reducing bandwidth by instantly transforming the Website content (images, scripts, style sheets, etc.) to create fewer long distance round trips, giving Web-based applications and intranets the defense they need against the evil forces of latency. Our superhero is committed to freeing organizations everywhere of application delays, so they can take on the world and fearlessly pursue business opportunities!

Announcing RiOS 7.0: Riverbed Connect Podcast

The following is a podcast featuring Bob Gilbert, Director of Marketing, and Naveen Prabhu, Product Marketing Manager for Steelhead Appliances, discussing the new features in RiOS 7.0. 

 

We'll have more coverage of the release of RiOS 7.0 throughout the week.

Announcing RiOS 7.0: A Little Something for Everyone

Today, Riverbed is pleased to announce the release of RiOS 7.0.  Each day this week we'll have a blog article (or two) that discusses the major new features contained in RiOS 7.0. Most of blog articles will be accompanied by a video with additional information about the feature. The press release announcing RiOS 7.0 can be found here.

In the spirit of giving during this Holiday season, Riverbed is pleased to announce RiOS 7.0, the next major release of the intelligent software brain running inside Riverbed’s market leading Steelhead WAN optimization appliances.

The release of RiOS 7 comes at the end of a fantastic 2011 for Riverbed, one in which the company’s flagship Steelhead product continued to gain momentum in the more-than-one-billion-dollar WAN Optimization market.  According to the most recent market share data from Gartner, Steelhead now boasts a commanding 51.7% market share, more than twice the next closest competitor.  For the first time, customers are selecting Steelhead more often than all other competitive alternatives combined.

RiOS 7 is a major step forward for Riverbed, though it has presented a bit of a challenge for our marketing team.  Why?  Generally major releases of RiOS can be characterized by primary themes.  For example, RiOS 6.5 was all about Quality of Service (QoS).  RiOS 6.0 was all about VDI and Citrix ICA optimization.

RiOS 7 is different in that it is comprised of several high-profile, yet equally valuable features and capabilities. Therefore, we’ve elected to use the wide range of features of RiOS 7.0 as its launch theme:  A Little Something for Everyone.

New Features Optimize Applications Customers Care About Most

VIDEO - Let’s start with an industry first for video optimization.  RiOS 7 features native live stream splitting support for Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash, no other vendor in the world supports both.  This will allow the increasing number of companies adopting video to optimize live video streaming over a global network, enabling single streams to travel across the wide area network to regional offices where multiple users can view the live stream from regional branch Steelheads sitting at the edge of the network.

UDP – With RiOS 7, Riverbed is broadening its protocol optimizations to include UDP optimization.  Often used by voice, video and disaster recovery applications, UDP represents a stable, if not growing,  percentage of overall Internet traffic.  With UDP optimization, Riverbed allows organizations to de-duplicate traffic flowing across UDP.  When combined with traditional TCP optimization, Riverbed delivers the most complete WAN optimization offering on the market.

IPv6 – RiOS 7 enables organizations to optimize traffic over IPv6.  While the move to IPv6 has been slower than many first projected, organizations know IPv6 is coming.  For a growing number of organizations, IPv6 is a reality today.

VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments have long been an area of focus for Riverbed because of the inherent performance challenges that result when separating users from their data over a network.  Today, Riverbed optimizes traffic in Citrix, VMware View and Microsoft Remote FX environments.  New in RiOS 7, Riverbed is adding acceleration and optimization capabilities known as Client Drive Mapping.  With this feature, as users plug thumb drives representing their desktop into thin client devices, Riverbed can accelerate all round trips between the thin client devices and associated centralized destinations.

PRE-POPULATION - Riverbed is enhancing pre-population capabilities over both HTTP and CIFS.  Now, IT professionals can pre-populate a video or file from a centralized location out to distributed locations world-wide, eliminating surges in traffic when content is requested company-wide.  For example, HR professionals can push an entire library of enrollment forms or compliance videos out to regional locations prior to asking employees to sign up for a new program or comply with new regulations.

INTEGRATION  - Integration is a key component of the RiOS 7 release.  Both Cascade Shark and well as Skipware are now natively embedded in Steelhead with RiOS 7.  Cascade Shark on-demand packet capture delivers greater visibility into traffic flowing across corporate networks, while Skipware gives organizations native Satellite optimization capabilities right on the Steelhead appliance.

SECURITY – RiOS 7 optimizes Encrypted Lotus Notes traffic, in addition to Microsoft Online Services traffic, delivering increased performance for messaging and collaboration solutions including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Office Live.  End-to-End Kerberos authentication support has also been added in RiOS 7.

I hope you get a chance to enjoy the “gift” that RiOS 7 is this Holiday season.  We’re quite proud of this release, and look forward to many more in the future.

Riverbed at Akamai Government Forum; Steve Riley to Present on Hybrid Cloud

With initiatives, mandates and reforms in place aimed at bringing efficiencies to government IT, it should be no surprise that over the last few months you’ve seen a lot of Riverbed at government IT conferences and events. After all, our IT performance solutions help government agencies meet initiatives, mandates and reforms – from enabling data center consolidation, to helping reduce costs for IT, and executing on the cloud first policy.

On November 16, Riverbed will be at the Akamai Government Forum, taking place at the Grand Hyatt Washington in Washington, D.C. The second annual Akamai Government Forum will focus on the latest solutions for scaling the Internet infrastructure for local, state and federal government agencies. Visit the Riverbed station to see demos and learn about our cloud performance solutions, including Steelhead WAN optimization, Stingray application delivery and Web content optimization, Cascade application-aware network performance management for traffic visibility, and Whitewater cloud storage gateways for data protection.

And, because you can’t get enough of him, Riverbed technical leader, cloud expert and aficionado Steve Riley will deliver the cloud track discussion on hybrid cloud from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. ET.

In his presentation, Steve will highlight how the performance problems associated with distance computing can be mitigated with optimization techniques designed for multiple layers: application, transport, network and storage.

Here is the teaser:

No longer just the fluff of airplane magazine articles, cloud computing is here to stay. The architectures envisioned for large public cloud providers are revolutionizing on-premises data centers, too. Hybrid clouds – clouds that utilize both public and private resources – allow agencies to spread workloads across multiple locations to satisfy distinct policy, regulatory, security and financial requirements. Hybrid clouds, like their individual counterparts, involve adding distance between users and their data. In most cases, the particular distance at any point in time is unpredictable, which will lead to inconsistent user experiences. Applications deployed in hybrid clouds often move large amounts of data across multiple internal and external providers; long waits for data transfer will affect productivity and availability.

Stop by; learn everything you need to know about optimization, acceleration and performance to meet the government IT mandates; and tell us what you thought of the conference.

 

Optimizing Your Global Infrastructure for SharePoint – Part 1

SharePoint is an amazingly rich and robust solution that has taken off like a rocket.  However, SharePoint’s performance isn’t always perceived as rocket fast by remote users.  Many times organizations forget not everyone is at HQ sitting around the corner from the SharePoint servers…where they have virtually unlimited bandwidth and only 1 – 2 milliseconds of latency.  In most global organizations employees are at remote sites far away from the SharePoint servers…where they have limited bandwidth and much higher latency.  This limited bandwidth and higher latency correlates to a slower user experience and subsequently lower productivity.

In this multi-part blog post we will discuss how your organization can optimize your infrastructure to ensure your employees get a very fast SharePoint experience – no matter where they are.

One of the first tasks most large global organizations will want to undertake is understanding how their SharePoint environment overlays the infrastructure.  Cascade’s dependency mapping, performance monitoring, multi-tier service maps, transaction analysis and other capabilities empower organizations to better understand, consolidate, support and troubleshoot global SharePoint environments.  For example it can help answer questions such as:

• Where are my SharePoint Servers? > Are any of them unauthorized, or at remote sites and need to be consolidated?
• Which sites/users connect to which servers? > How fast is their experience? > Which users are the most disadvantaged?
• How many of my SharePoint users connect from the Internet/VPN versus internally?
• How many objects make up specific web pages? > Which objects are the largest/slowest? > How much delay is on the server versus the network?
• What backend servers do my SharePoint web servers connect to and depend upon?
• Are the SharePoint/IIS servers authenticating to a local Domain Controller for all users, or are they unexpectedly hitting a remote Domain Controller for some users?
• How much bandwidth does my crawling of regional SharePoint sites consume? > Is it impacting business applications?
• How much backup traffic does SharePoint generate?  Which path does it take to the DR/COOP Site?

Now that we understand SharePoint globally it is time to start strategizing how to improve performance.  There are several ways to approach this and priorities will depend on your organization’s goals.  In this series we’ll take the approach that user productivity and application availability take priority over infrastructure optimization. 

The fastest and easiest way to optimize general user experience and productivity within SharePoint is to optimize the content being served up.  To accomplish this Stingray Aptimizer, formerly Aptimize, has consistently been found by SharePoint administrators to be the solution of choice. It makes web pages pages 30 – 75% faster, increases server throughput, and takes only a few hours to fully configure and start improving performance.  Plus you can kick the tires for free prior to making a decision. 

Stingray Aptimizer is loaded on the SharePoint web server as a Runtime Page Optimizer (RPO). 
It improves performance by file merging, dynamic layout, compression, caching and more so that users see the page significantly faster. This results in fewer objects, fewer authentication turns, more use of the browser’s cache, lower network utilization and less load on the server infrastructure.  It has a huge impact on productivity and encourages users to engage SharePoint even more.  For third-party validation read about how Microsoft uses Stingray Aptimizer on their own SharePoint site.  

For the uber-geek here are live reports from www.webpagetest.org so you can compare optimized and non-optimized performance of Microsoft's SharePoint site.

Homepage 

    Aptimizer enabled: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111028_P8_20Q3G/

    Aptimizer disabled: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111028_16_20Q6X/

Customer page 

    Aptimizer enabled: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111028_KC_20QM5/

    Aptimizer disabled: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/111028_ZR_20Q3E/

If you’re a visual person here are two great videos about Stingray Aptimizer:

1)    How It Works

2)    How to Install, Configure & Deploy

Wondering how much faster your SharePoint could be?  What are you waiting for? Give Stingray Aptimizer a try for free today.

In the next post of this series we’ll discuss how Stingray Traffic Manager and Application Firewall intelligently load balance, scale and protect global SharePoint environments.

 

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

We love developers!

If you’re no stranger to the Riverbed blog, any of our other social media outlets, or even our web site, by now you’re aware of our new acceleration offerings. Keen observers (and we know you’re all keen!) will note these products depart from our traditional symmetric optimization history. We’ve already discussed why we believe this matters. I’d like to write a bit about to whom it does.

We realize that an IT organization comprises more than those who build the networks and shepherd equipment that routes datagrams. All of that infrastructure would be unnecessary if it weren’t for the applications they run and the data they move about. And while plenty of great technology choices can help the network guys discover and accelerate their prized datagrams, developers, too, can benefit from tools and techniques that improve the speed of their code and the availability of their data.

As a developer, you’re continually trying to balance conflicting demands. Your code must run fast, function correctly, contain no vulnerabilities, and reuse other elements where possible—all, of course, on schedule. At times, some of these demands give way to others—that’s just reality. Aligning resources to meet a release date with full functionality might require constraining resources available for optimizing your code’s performance. That’s where we can help.

Our Stingray line of products is designed specifically to ease the pressure to tightly optimize your code. It can also help you eliminate the worries of deploying code that you acquired elsewhere and are unable to modify it to streamline its performance. Whether you need to improve the response time of a single SharePoint server or rapidly distribute high-performing applications across multiple geographic locations, we at Riverbed realize that you, our new developer audience, deserve the same kind of high-quality attention to your needs as we’ve provided our networking friends for years.

We encourage you to explore our new application-oriented performance offerings. Then, take a walk downstairs (it’s almost always downstairs, isn’t it?) and chat with your buddies in the networking department. They might look kind of scary, but they’re cool people—I promise, I used to be one of them! Swap some stories about how eliminating performance bottlenecks has helped your organization rise above your competitors. And work together to ensure that your entire IT stack—from the datagrams to the data—perform at the speed of 21st century business.

Riverbed 101 - An introduction video to Riverbed's products

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

 

 

Enhancing your applications for mobile device access

I recently came across a fantastic infographic courtesy of Microsoft Tag that highlights some very interesting statistics on how people are using mobile devices in 2011 and the possible impacts on mobile marketing.

The element of the infographic that really grabbed my attention was ‘how fast is mobile internet growing?’ According to the graph mobile internet usage is projected to overtake desktop internet usage by 2015.

So, why should we care about this projected growth?

As an increasing number of organizations look to offer their services online the requirement to have an online presence that performs and meets the expectations of customers no matter what type of device (and not just the trusty old desktop) they are using, is now even more important than ever.

If more of us are going to use mobile devices in the future as the preferred way to access the applications that support these online services, this will have implications on the way those applications are developed and designed to provide the best possible level of performance. According to a recent article in ClickZ, research shows a simple 1 second delay could result in 7 percent fewer conversions, 11 percent fewer page views, and even a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction – not something your organization is going to want to experience.

So, wouldn’t it be helpful to understand which mobile devices visitors are using to access your applications and online services and in-turn help understand how to tailor applications for the best possible level of performance? However, as we all know, the number of devices with different capabilities and the frequency with which they come onto the market is quite amazing. For example, a recent article published on the Rimm-Kaufman Group blog shows that in its last quarter Apple sold 9.25 million ipads which is an increase year on year of 183%.

So, how can an organization keep pace with this change?

Well, thanks to Luca Passani at WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource File) and his contributors, including individuals from a number of the carriers, there is a way! WURFL is a global database of all devices and their capabilities. This file can be accessed by developers so that they can build applications and services that perform better for their users when using certain mobile devices including those from Apple.

For those of you who are already using Zeus’ software-ADC solution for intelligently managing their web-based application traffic, Luca and his contributors offer a Java API. This means that those responsible for writing and developing applications can now build this type of mobile device application enhancement on their application delivery solution.

The data provided by WURFL and the use of a software-ADC like Zeus can help organizations overcome a number of issues. Let's finish with one issue in particular. How can an organization ensure that the performance experienced by those using mobile devices is not compromised due to the resolution of the content being delivered back to them? Well, by identifying which mobile devices visitors are using, the organization can then make an informed decision on the resolution of the content that is delivered back. This will help ensure that the content being requested is delivered back as quickly as possible, resulting in improved page load times.

If the projected increase in mobile internet usage becomes reality, how confident is your organization that the performance experienced by those using mobile devices to access your online services is not compromised?

Image source: Microsoft Tag

All Sharepoint. All the time.

Recently, a lot of my work has been focusing on Microsoft SharePoint 2010.  I wanted to take a moment to blog about two recent related efforts:

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 interoperability testing in Redmond

Riverbed Steelhead appliances have been optimizing Microsoft applications since the beginning, but we are getting a fresh look at improving our protocol optimization by working directly with the Microsoft Interoperability Team at the Microsoft Partner Solutions Center in Redmond, WA.  Riverbed has a lab there that we use to work with customers, but now it's great to work with Microsoft directly to get both technical teams working together.

A special thanks goes out to HP, who provided the servers and network hardware for our interoperability lab.

Riverbed booth at Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011

From the lab, I go on the road to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 in Aneheim, CA.  Our booth will be showcasing Riverbed Steelheads and the Aptimize SharePoint Accelerator.  In and out of the cloud, from document management to complete searchable websites, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 redefines the collaborative environment.  Riverbed Technology enables that capability on the WAN.

Look for the Riverbed Technology booth at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 from Oct 3-6.  Conference information can be found at http://www.mssharepointconference.com .

Aptimize: Supercharging Your SharePoint Performance!

Do you have issues with Microsoft SharePoint environment performance?  While SharePoint is an amazing collaboration tool with loads of rich features, oftentimes long distances and bandwidth limitations can get in the way of delivering the best possible SharePoint experience to remote workers. 

No one likes to wait, and delays will drive users’ behavior.  If SharePoint is too slow, dissatisfied employees won’t use it as much as they could, might open IT tickets in complaint, or may even abandon it entirely.  This can result in productivity losses and missed opportunities in SharePoint deployments.  What to do?
 
Enter Riverbed!
 
Steelhead WAN optimization has been able to improve SharePoint performance for branch office workers with data reduction, HTTP protocol features, and even application specific tuning to accelerate authentication for example.
 
Now complementing Steelhead is our new Aptimize web content optimization software, which can immediately deliver additional performanceimprovements when installed on the SharePoint server.  Aptimize also has the advantage of being able to optimize asymmetrically (nothing required on the client side!)

 
Aptimize will help SharePoint by:

• Merging web page files for fewer roundtrips
• Shrinking and compressing these files to reduce data quantity
• Increasing browser caching to reduce reload times
• Tuning the page layout to display first things first

 
The results speak for themselves:

• Up to 76% reduction in load times
• Up to 43% less traffic
• AND happier and more productive SharePoint users

 So whether you are a Steelhead customer today or new to Riverbed and looking for a fresh approach, here’s your chance to supercharge your SharePoint environment!
 
Reach out to your local Riverbed representative to learn more.

The Industrial Cloud Revolution

Does anyone else miss writing those high school history papers? You know, the ones that all start “With the Industrial Revolution came widespread change across the economic, political and social fabric of western civilization…” Blah, blah, blah. Anyone? Anyone?

Not so much, eh? Okay, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve flown solo in the history-nerd department.

But the reason the Industrial Revolution was such a great opener for many a high-school history paper was that it really did transform the economics of production, which had wide-reaching implications for modern civilization. Production went from small-scale, localized, cottage-industry to large-scale, concentrated production centers benefiting from economies of scale and scope. Various innovations, from the flying shuttle to the assembly line, were instrumental in creating the efficiencies of industrial revolution factories, but at the end of the day, creating more products, more quickly wasn’t worth much unless you had exposure to enough customers to buy them. In other words, you had to get all those products to market.

Enter the steam engine. With a steam-powered railway infrastructure, industrialized manufacturers could get their products to more markets, faster.  Which is a good thing when you just churned out more pairs of pants in a year than everyone in a hundred mile radius could wear in their combined lifetimes.


So, why am I going off about steam engines and the Industrial Revolution? Well, here in IT land, we’re having a bit of an Industrial Revolution redux. Virtualization has enabled IT administrators to consolidate servers and gain economies of scale, and companies like Amazon, Rackspace and AT&T are beginning to offer basic IT services on-demand, passing on even GREATER economies of scale. But all the cheaper, on-demand compute and storage in the world isn’t worth much if you can’t get the product (applications) to market (users).

We need a steam engine for the cloud revolution. Oh, wait! WAN optimization has proven to accelerate network-based applications by reducing bandwidth consumption and the impact of latency. Choo-choo!! Layer on network performance monitoring (who’s keeping track of all these trains?), web content optimization (how are we loading these products on the trains?), and application delivery controllers (what train is going where, when?) and you have yourself the speed and intelligence for a high-performance cloud delivery system.

 All aboard!

Extra credit: Join Amazon Web Services Senior Evangelist, Jeff Barr, and me on August 17 for a webinar on how to optimize your cloud server deployments. Register here!

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.