Riverbed Enhances and Expands Steelhead Portfolio

Riverbed Technology (RVBD) is introducing hardware appliance models and software enhancements to its Riverbed Steelhead product family. A new Steelhead CX adds solid state drives and software enhancements.

Riverbed said the performance delivered by the new releases better enables global enterprises to consolidate and scale their IT from the data center and the branch to mobile workers, and to realize the benefits of modern data center transformation.

Performance Gains for Riverbed's New Steelhead Models

The new Steelhead CX 5055 and CX7055 appliances are tuned for high-performance by combining new levels of bandwidth and TCP session scalability with Solid State Drives (SSDs). The new models result in an up to 50 percent increase in both wide area network (WAN) capacity and number of connections in a single appliance over the Steelhead 5050 model appliance and the Steelhead 7050 model appliance, respectively. With the Riverbed Interceptor appliance organizations can support up to one million connections.

"As data centers continue to evolve, organizations are looking to simplify IT operations, and improve end-user experience without adding cost and complexity," said Miles Kelly, senior director, product marketing at Riverbed. "These new Steelhead models and software enhancements better enable global enterprises to consolidate and scale while delivering a consistent end-user experience."

Steelhead Mobile 4.0 simplifies the management and provisioning of mobile users and devices while scaling to support up to 120,000 mobile users. The new version includes end-to-end Kerberos authentication support used by Microsoft applications and platforms including Active Directory and Windows Server, native optimization for SMBv2 traffic, and full-spectrum optimization for Outlook Anywhere.

New in RiOS 8.0, Riverbed is offering the industry's first quality of service (QoS) for PCoIP (PC-over-IP) that delivers fine-grained control of VMware View virtual desktop traffic. In August Riverbed announced its plan to partner with Teradici, the developer of the PCoIP protocol that enables a true PC experience for desktop virtualization. Also new to version 8 of RiOS, Riverbed expands its integrated QoS capabilities 6-fold over previous versions of RiOS with the ability to scale automatic identification and prioritization to more than 600 applications.

VMware vSphere integration with Steelhead EX

Riverbed also announced the integration of VMware vSphere into its Riverbed Steelhead EX model appliances. This integration provides organizations with a single platform for simplified, centralized management of distributed virtual services at a lower total cost of ownership. Locally executed virtual machines running on Steelhead EX appliances can now be centrally managed by the VMware vSphere vCenter Server. When combined with the Granite edge virtual server infrastructure (edge-VSI), the integrated solution allows organizations to leverage the investments they have made in the data center and extend control and policy boundaries to the edge of the network.

"Enterprises are building efficient, virtualized data centers to improve business agility in the face of an explosion of users, devices and data. By extending the virtual edge of the data center all the way to the branch, enterprises now have a holistic approach to creating a data center without walls. End users get the speed and performance they require, while IT manages from a simplified consolidated architecture. The result is a leaner, more productive business that enjoys end-to-end performance, reliability and security from the data center to the edge," said Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.