Riverbed Rolls Out Two WAN Optimization Offerings Aimed at the Cloud

By Charlene O'Hanlon

Riverbed Technology is advancing its cloud computing strategy with two new products designed to accelerate the movement of data into and out of the cloud.

Private and public clouds offer the promise of efficiency and flexibility, but come with performance barriers caused by the distance between users and their data,” said Eric Wolford, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Riverbed. Riverbed is delivering flexible, accelerated performance without requiring IT organizations to make changes to their current architecture.”

Riverbed Cloud Steelhead is a software-based application that sits in the cloud providers data center to reduce the time it takes to migrate data to and from the public cloud. The portal interface makes setup and implementation easy, and the applications automatic discovery feature enables seamless cloud integration.

A discovery agent built into the software has the ability to automatically find and establish connections to cloud environments,” Wolford said.

IT departments also can use their existing Cloud Steelhead settings and configurations to bring new Cloud Steelhead instances online quickly and easily.

Riverbed also announced Whitewater, a physical or virtual appliance-based storage accelerator that helps dramatically speed backup and recovery time in the cloud. In tests Whitwater reduced an average 9-hour backup to 10 minutes, Wolford said.

Security is also a major feature of Whitewater the appliance encrypts data in transit and stores the encryption key only at the customer end. Whitewater integrates seamlessly with existing backup software, ensuring that enterprises can utilize cloud storage without any changes to their already-established software and processes.

Both offerings will be available through Riverbeds channel partners by the end of the year, Wolford said.