Riverbed Integrates Stingray and SDN With VMware

Riverbed Technology (RVBD) made integration announcements at VMWorld 2012, with Stingray Traffic Manager integrating with VMware's vFabric Application Director, and a planned product to ensure operational viability of VMware-based SDNs and virtual data centers.

Stingray and vFabric Application Director integration

Riverbed announced the integration of Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager, its software and virtual application delivery controller (ADC), with VMware vFabric Application Director, a hybrid cloud application provisioning solution. This solution allows customers to create application blueprints that can be used to provision and scale multi-tier applications more effectively in a hybrid cloud environment.

"Though cloud computing provides enterprises with many benefits, the need to instantly meet user demands can prove challenging for application architects," said Rohit Mehra, director of Enterprise Communications Infrastructure at IDC. "Solutions for these challenges must match the nature of the cloud itself - they must be innovative and flexible. The merging of acceleration and automation capabilities is invaluable for organizations seeking to quickly and cost-efficiently deploy and provide high-performing applications."

Riverbed will also leverage other product vendors in VMware's Cloud Applications Management Marketplace beta to expand the solution. Riverbed and software provider Zend collaborated and yielded a blueprint for Magento E-Commerce store on a clustered high availability Zend server fronted by Riverbed.

"As applications move to the cloud and become more dynamic, performance solutions must keep pace with how they are changing," said Apurva Davé, vice president of products, Stingray Business Unit at Riverbed. "The Stingray Traffic Manager software was designed with the cloud in mind, and its ability to accelerate applications is unrivaled. Riverbed and VMware have a longstanding history that enables better-performing IT for enterprises."

Solutions planned for SDN

Riverbed also announced an extension of its strategic partnership with VMware with the introduction of a performance management solution for software-defined networks (SDN) and the ability to provision wide area network (WAN) optimization for virtual data centers.

The Cascade product family support for VXLAN will provide an application-aware network performance management (NPM) solution for SDN performance management and Steelhead Cloud Edition will be further integrated with VMware vCloud Director to simplify deployment, configuration, and management of wide area network.

"Our partnership with Riverbed was founded on the goal to help enterprises accelerate their journey to the cloud and enable businesses to increase efficiency and improve productivity while reducing costs," said Allwyn Sequeira, vice president and CTO, networking and security, at VMware. "Rigid networking and security architectures based on purpose-built hardware and fragmented management interfaces pose a barrier to achieving the promise of the software-defined data center. "This latest collaboration with Riverbed brings the needed visibility and performance to address the challenges associated with the next evolution of virtualization, and enables customers to embrace SDNs."

The two companies are collaborating in the development of a new VXLAN-aware Internet Protocol Flow Information Export (IPFIX) format to enable network and application performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting, allowing organizations to embrace SDNs without sacrificing operational control.

"VXLAN will play a major role in deploying virtual networks with the same simplicity and operational ease that enterprises expect with virtual machines," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "However, it will be imperative for IT organizations to have visibility into the traffic flowing across virtual networks in order to maintain control and ensure security and compliance policies. Riverbed and VMware are taking a collaborative and integrated approach to solving the next wave of challenges associated with network performance management in a fully virtualized or cloud environment by delivering comprehensive monitoring and troubleshooting for SDNs."

Riverbed has several interviews, discussions and demonstrations of the announcements made Monday on its blog.

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