Riverbed Delivers New Steelhead Data Center Appliance

Riverbed Technologies (RVBD) is bringing to market an addition to its Steelhead WAN optimization family it said will enable organizations to transfer and protect more data, lower risk and costs while improving business continuity.

The purpose-built appliance—dubbed the DX Edition 8000 series and designed specifically for data center-to-data center data replication workloads—delivers up to 60x WAN performance acceleration and as much as 99 percent bandwidth reduction, Riverbed said.

With the new device, organizations can move, store and back up data no matter where their data center facilities are located, said Paul O’Farrell, Steelhead Products Group senior vice president and general manager.

“The new Steelhead DX Edition eliminates distance between data centers as a barrier to achieving true location-independent computing, which in this case means that data can be moved, stored and backed up regardless of where facilities are located, but with performance similar to a local area network,” he said.

The unit supports up to 2Gbps of optimized WAN capacity and up to 10Gbps of optimized LAN capacity, while optimizing up to 10,000 TCP and UDP application flows, Riverbed said. In addition, it offers optimizations for data replication applications such as NetApp (NTAP) SnapMirror and EMC (EMC) Symmetrix Remote Data Facility for enhancements of data replication processes end-to-end across the WAN, the company said.

Riverbed aims to capitalize on the growing importance of WAN performance in framing business initiatives such as data center consolidation, centralization of branch servers and storage and transitioning from tape-based backup to WAN-based data replication. The vendor’s thinking is that organizations benefitting from doing away with costly WAN infrastructure upgrades require fast and predictable WAN performance while overcoming impairments such as high latency, packet loss, limited bandwidth and application competition.

That point is echoed by David Titov, Trace 3 practice director, who said “the predictably fast performance provided by the Steelhead DX Edition appliances, coupled with enhanced visibility and control of DR processes, allows our customers to sleep better at night knowing that their data replication workloads will complete on time every time, even in the presence of unforeseen changes in workload or network conditions.”