Accelerated Pathway to the Cloud

Riverbed Technology, the IT performance company, has announced the release of version 6.1 of the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), which powers Riverbed’s wide area network (WAN) optimisation solutions. With this release, Riverbed accelerates organisations’ pathway to the cloud by providing enhanced acceleration for cloud services and enterprise applications. These enhancements provide companies with more flexibility when determining the best approach for consolidating IT resources to public, private and hybrid cloud environments and ensure that they obtain maximum performance regardless of their network architecture.

Riverbed continues to deliver acceleration for the broadest range of applications and platforms of any WAN optimisation vendor. RiOS 6.1 features new optimisations for Lotus Notes 8.5. In addition, the new version provides new optimisations for a range of Microsoft suites including Exchange 2010, SharePoint and Microsoft Online for SharePoint and Exchange. Additionally, RiOS 6.1 delivers enhanced optimisations for disaster recovery (DR) performance, providing intelligent storage networking protocol enhancements to ensure better performance, greater scale and easier management for enterprises with large data centre environments.

“With this release, Riverbed is providing its customers with the necessary tools to support critical IT initiatives such as private and public cloud computing, IT centralisation and disaster recovery. As CIOs turn to centralised IT models to reduce costs, WAN optimisation is an increasingly critical tool required to maintain performance and ensure that distant employees remain productive,” says Cindy Borovick, vice president at IDC.

Superior Application and Infrastructure Flexibility

Enhanced Optimisation for Microsoft Applications

Many organisations have struggled with the performance of Microsoft Exchange over the WAN, forcing them to undergo the expensive and complex task of deploying Exchange servers at each remote office to support local users. RiOS 6.1 delivers enhanced latency optimisation and data reduction improvements for both encrypted and unencrypted Exchange 2010 traffic, delivering data reductions up to 95 percent. By taking advantage of these features, organisations can efficiently deliver Exchange traffic over the WAN and, as a result, consolidate previously distributed Exchange servers back to the data centre. In addition, as many businesses focus on upgrading to Exchange 2010, Riverbed is providing them with the ability to leverage their current investment in WAN optimisation by ensuring superior application performance.

In addition to Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint has become a business-critical application as enterprises strive to improve productivity by sharing documents and information in a collaborative environment. New features in RiOS 6.1 extend Riverbed’s existing SharePoint optimisations, eliminating many of the performance issues encountered by remote users. RiOS 6.1 accelerates traffic at both the network layer and application layer and eliminates unnecessary round trips associated with SharePoint authentication requests, enabling Steelhead appliances to deliver enhanced SharePoint optimisation and reduce application latency and response times by up to 50 percent more than previous web acceleration found in RiOS.

Optimising Applications in the Cloud

As organisations move to cloud environments for hosting data and applications, users become more separated from business-critical IT resources, and productivity often suffers because of poor application performance caused by latency and bandwidth limitations over the WAN. RiOS 6.1 addresses these issues for key business applications, enabling organisations to overcome the performance hurdles of moving to cloud environments. RiOS 6.1 optimises both encrypted and unencrypted traffic for Exchange Online and provides Layer 7 application acceleration for SharePoint Online, ensuring enhanced performance for organisations leveraging Microsoft cloud-based services. Riverbed is the only WAN optimisation vendor to provide enhanced acceleration and optimisation for organisations using Microsoft Online for SharePoint and Exchange.

Enhanced Performance for Lotus Notes 8.5

In this new version of RiOS, Riverbed introduces the ability to optimise and accelerate encrypted traffic for Lotus Notes 8.5, making Riverbed the first WAN optimisation vendor to optimise traffic for the latest release of Lotus Notes. This feature also provides latency optimisation for Domino Server and Notes Client replication, making Riverbed the WAN optimisation vendor with the broadest coverage for Domino and Lotus Notes replication use cases.

“As organisations continue to consolidate IT environments and explore cloud computing, they face performance challenges in connecting users over the WAN to business-critical applications and data. Riverbed’s advanced application- and network-level fluency provides our customers with substantially improved performance over other acceleration products, regardless of which network architecture they use, which applications they run, or where their data resides,” says Christo Briedenhann, country manager: Africa at Riverbed.

Enhanced Disaster Recovery Performance

For organisations looking to accelerate replication traffic over the WAN, RiOS 6.1 delivers enhanced storage optimisations for DR initiatives by reducing DR traffic and accelerating replication times between data centres.

Enhanced storage networking optimisations provided by Riverbed in RiOS 6.1 include:

EMC SRDF Optimisations –
•Riverbed customers that use EMC Symmetrix VMAX and Symmetrix DMX will benefit from improved data reduction and throughput due to the RiOS 6.1’s enhanced EMC SRDF optimisation.
•RiOS 6.1 also offers a new auto-negotiate compression feature for EMC SRDF, enabling simplified management and increased availability.

FCIP Optimisations – RiOS 6.1 provides storage networking optimisations for FCIP traffic over Brocade 7500 and Cisco MDS gateways. These enhancements speed FCIP traffic to and across the network on both a protocol and a network level.

Riverbed is the first and only WAN optimisation vendor to deliver both network and application-layer optimisations for large scale replication, enabling the highest levels of data reduction and throughput.

To optimise data protection, Riverbed has a number of partnerships with a variety of leading storage vendors, including Dell EqualLogic, Double-Take Software, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, NetApp and Symantec.

Lastly, RiOS 6.1 provides additional enhancements that provide high availability for branch office edge services and improved network resiliency. To learn more about all of the new features in RiOS 6.1, please visit: www.riverbed.com/rios. RiOS 6.1 will be generally available this quarter.