Cloud News: Riverbed, Rackspace, Rightscale

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the cloud computing sector:

Riverbed expands Steelhead and partners.  Riverbed Technology (RVBD) announced that the company has enhanced the capabilities of its Cloud Steelhead wide area network (WAN) optimization solution, adding compatibility with ESX-based public cloud services. “As our customers explore migrating business-critical IT services to the public cloud, they have turned to Riverbed to ensure that performance will not suffer,” said Apurva Davé, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed.  “Cloud Steelhead enables customers to get the most out of their investment in public cloud services, overcome the performance hurdles inherent in the cloud, and ensure that end users are able to access the data and applications they need to do business.” Riverbed also expanded their cloud service provider ecosystem and offers validated technical compatibility with a number of providers such as Terremark, ZettaServe and Xtium, as well as solution technology partners CloudSwitch and Media Platform. CloudSwitch added that the joint solution addresses customer requests for improved performance, ease of deployment, full configurability, security and control in the cloud.

Rackspace announces cloud load balancers. Rackspace Hosting announced the availability of Cloud Load Balancers. Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers provides operational efficiency to customers, is easy to set up and provides seamless integration with Cloud Servers or dedicated servers. The new balancers feature built-in high availability, multiple protocols and algorithms, API and control panel access, and session persistence. "Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers provides businesses with a simple, yet feature-rich, tool to scale applications and increase overall reliability,” said Josh Odom, product line leader of platform for the Rackspace Cloud.  “We relied heavily on input from our customers in developing an offering that we believe exceeds the capabilities of other load balancing options on the market today.”

Amazon launches Live Streaming for CloudFront.  Amazon (AMZN) announced the launch of live HTTP streaming for Amazon CloudFront. Live video running on Amazon Web Services is enabled by CloudFront with EC2 instances running Adobe's Flash Media Server and Amazon Route 53 (AWS's DNS service). An AWS CloudFormation template that handles all of the provisioning and sequencing for all the AWS resources you need for this live streaming stack. Amazon also announced support in AWS Mobile SDKs for CloudWatch, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Email Services (SES), SimpleDB, Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling.

RightScale and Zend announce joint solution. RightScale and Zend Technologies, the PHP Company, announced a jointly-developed solution for deploying and managing business-critical PHP applications with high availability, elasticity and portability in the cloud. The new RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack provides a pre-configured open Platform as a Service (PaaS) architecture for faster cloud onboarding while maintaining the ability to customize and control the cloud environment. It offers cloud portability, pre-configured architecture, autoscaling, redundant database and PHP session clustering for high availability. "Through our partnership with RightScale we enable customers to take full advantage of the cloud," said Andi Gutmans, CEO and co-founder of Zend. "With the new solution, customers can benefit from the agility and elasticity offered by the cloud, while using Zend’s proven, enterprise-grade PHP runtime environment in production."