Riverbed Technology introduced three new “Steelhead” WAN optimization appliances that deliver high scalability and acceleration for up to one million simultaneous connections at 4 Gbps throughput. The latest release of the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), version 3.0, supports QoS enforcement for all traffic types, including TCP, VoIP, video, and any other forms of UDP.
The Steelhead appliances, which sit at both ends of a WAN connection, optimize performance across all traffic types, including voice and video. The product rollout includes:
- the Steelhead 5520 — which delivers optimized WAN bandwidth of up to OC-3 (155 Mbps) and 800 Mbps with disk-based data reduction disabled. It supports up to 15,000 simultaneous TCP connections and has a disk capacity of 1.5 TB and a data store of 700 GB.
- the Steelhead 6020 — which is the most scalable WAN optimization product on the market. It delivers up to 310 Mbps and 800 Mbps with disk-based data reduction disabled. The Steelhead 6020 can support up to 40,000 simultaneous TCP connections and has a disk capacity of 3.2 TB and a data store of 1.4 TB.
- The Riverbed Interceptor 9200 allows very large organizations to deliver massive scalability by enabling virtual in-path clusters of Steelhead appliances without Web Cache Communications Protocol (WCCP) or Policy-Based Routing (PBR). The device supports up to a million simultaneous TCP connections per cluster and up to 4 Gbps of optimized WAN throughput. WAN administrators can configure, upgrade, and scale clustered Steelhead appliances non-obtrusively.
Optimizations in RiOS 3.0 include Network File System (NFS) application streamlining, which accelerates NFS for Linux/Unix users without the need for caching or explicit proxies. The performance of Unix-based applications such as ClearCase, Unigraphics, Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application (CATIA), and remote Home Directory access can increase by up to 55 times. RiOS 3.0 also includes new optimizations for the Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol that improve the performance of collaborative applications such as Visio and SolidWorks by up to 20 times. Every Steelhead introduced into the network can auto-detect over 4,000 other Steelhead peers without requiring complex tunneling configurations.
Every Steelhead introduced into the network can auto-detect over 4,000 other Steelhead peers without requiring complex tunneling configurations.
Riverbed said it now has over 1,000 customers. For its latest fiscal quarter, the company racked up sales of $18 millionhttp://www.riverbed.com/
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WAN Optimization: Finding the Best Approach |
| There are critical factors beyond bandwidth limitations that impede performance and productivity. While users complain that the network is painfully slow, network managers insist that the problem must lie outside the network, since utilization is at only a fraction of the total bandwidth available. How can both arguments be correct? Latency is the secret throughput killer. Physics dictate that latency is unavoidable in a wide area network – the information takes some small amount of time to traverse the network connection. But when transport and application protocols are layered on top of typical network latencies, frustration can mount as employees wait for data and applications to load. |
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