Riverbed Meets Microsoft ForeFront Threat Management

Riverbed is expanding their relationship with Microsoft by combining Riverbed WAN optimization with Microsoft’s Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG). The solution is bundled together into on single appliance. Here’s a bit about the effort.

It works like this: Microsoft’s TMG lives on the Steelhead appliance. It lets customers virtualize their branch office infrastructure, while also giving “LAN-like” application performance for branch users, all while protecting them from spam and web threats.

The Microsoft-Riverbed partnership also takes advantage of Riverbed services as well, notably the RSP or Riverbed Services Platform — which is a virtualized platform that runs branch services integrated into the flagship Riverbed Steehead appliance.

VARs can use RSP to deploy up to 5 services on a single device, increasing consolidation even more. Riverbed also stressed you can virtualize and run other Microsoft services on RSP, like Windows Server, Active Directory and DNS/DHCP.

But what about the channel? I spoke to Vikram Ramesh, senior solutions marketing manager at Riverbed. Very simply, Riverbed says the company is moving beyond networking VARs.

Currently, Microsoft TMG costs $1,499 for those with a Steelhead appliance with RSP. Customers can also chose to deploy Windows Server as well.

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