Riverbed RiOS 8.5 Accelerates Steelhead WAN Optimization Appliance
Riverbed RiOS 8.5 Accelerates Steelhead WAN Optimization Appliance by UCStrategies Staff
Enhancements have been made to Riverbed Technology’s Steelhead WAN optimization appliance; the management of hybrid MPLS and Internet networks has been made easier with the addition of new software, and this also strengthens the performance of Microsoft and NetApp applications.
According to Riverbed, the most recent edition of its software platform, which was released last week, RiOS 8.5, makes these improvements available.
Furthermore, a new Steelhead hardware appliance, the CX 255 series, has been unveiled, and will benefit small to midsize branches. It will be released in the next quarter, and provides three times the throughput of its former versions (the Steelhead CX 150 and CX 250) by offering up to 6-Mpbs bandwidth capacity.
Richmond, Virginia-based VistaOne is a solution provider and Riverbed partner, and the president of that company, Steve Inman, noted that the CX 255 series release is a very big move for Riverbed; it means that partners will be able to focus on smaller or midsize organizations in addition to scaling the application for the enterprise.
Inman said: “We can now go attack markets that, for a long time, weren't attacked by Riverbed,” citing smaller retail chains as an example.
The RiOS 8.5 seeks to support partners and network administrators speed up application delivery across heavily bandwidth-strapped networks. The vice president of product management at Riverbed, Jess Leroy, comments that there is now more network traffic than ever as a result of mobile devices and bandwidth-hungry applications (like video), and businesses are struggling to stay on top of this.
Leroy said: “The feedback we are getting from customers is overwhelmingly, 'I just don't know what to do with all the data I have to support.'”
Leroy added that San Francisco, California-based Riverbed has seen a vast rise in traffic, and the average Riverbed customer has seen a growth rate of 23 percent year over year. To counter this, hybrid MPLS and Internet networks are being adopted by companies in order to optimize support.
Path selection is the key feature in RiOS 8.5; this lets IT understand application usage and performance down to the specific application type, and when performance goes down, it is possible to reroute application flows. Put simply, the path selection feature is able to note the best network "path" an application should take so that it reaches its end user as quickly as possible.
Path selection will work with Riverbed's Quality of Service and deep packet inspection technologies, according to Leroy.
He added: “We're identifying all the paths that are available for a branch, so somebody might have an MPLS path, they might have an Internet path, they might have two or three paths available. So there are lots of different options there. But what we're doing is identifying all these paths, allowing you to create the QoS classes you want, identify the applications, and then decide which applications are going to take which paths.”
RiOS 8.5 also offers integration with Riverbed's flagship network monitoring and analytics tool, Cascade Profiler 10.0.7, along with new application-level latency which enhances the performance of NetApp's SnapMirror.
Inman said: “SharePoint has become a pretty ubiquitous tool in the enterprise. So Riverbed adding SharePoint Layer 7 acceleration – that’s huge because that's a very widely deployed [application]. And I can kind of look down under the dome and see that there is going to be any number of companies migrating to more SharePoint.”
Similar to the new Steelhead CX 255 series appliance, RiOS 8.5 will be generally available in Q3 of this year. (CY) Link