Data centre Steelhead appliance

“The Steelhead product family is already the most complete WAN optimisation solution in the market, and with this announcement we added another important and business-critical use case,” said Paul O’Farrell, senior vice president and general manager, Steelhead Products Group, Riverbed. “The new Steelhead DX Edition eliminates distance between datacentres 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. Only Riverbed offers a complete solution for both large-scale branch-to-datacentre and datacentre-to-datacentre environments.”

Taking the Network Out of the Business Continuity Equation
Today, WAN performance plays a central role in strategic business initiatives such as datacentre consolidation, centralisation of branch servers and storage and transitioning from tape-based backup to WAN-based data replication. Given the rapid growth in data combined with these initiatives that are consolidating more data in fewer datacentres, organisations are struggling to maintain the service-level agreements, such as Recovery Point and Time Objectives (RPO/RTO), associated with mission-critical business continuity and disaster recovery processes. To transfer and protect more data more often, organisations must ensure fast and predictable WAN performance despite common WAN performance impairments − high latency, packet loss, limited bandwidth and competition among applications, while protecting the bottom line by eliminating the unnecessary costs and delays associated with WAN infrastructure upgrades.

“Maintaining fast and predictable WAN performance into and between datacentres has become critical for many of today’s enterprises,” said Brad Casemore, Research Director at IDC. “Protecting data within and across multiple datacentres is essential to keeping a business online and operational. The challenge is doing so without generating ever increasing operational cost and risk, even as data sets and replication workloads continue to increase.”

The Steelhead DX Edition 8000 Series features software and hardware purpose-built and optimised for datacentre-to-datacentre workloads. Supporting up to 2 Gbps of optimised WAN capacity and up to 10 Gbps of optimised LAN capacity while optimising up to 10,000 TCP and UDP application flows, Steelhead DX Edition 8000 Series delivers superior value for accelerating data transfers over long distance. In addition, the solution provides unique optimisations for data replication applications such as NetApp® SnapMirror® and EMC® Symmetrix® Remote Data Facility (SRDF®), providing advanced performance, enhanced visibility and fine-grain control of data replication processes end-to-end across the WAN.

Steelhead WAN Optimisation Solutions and the Riverbed Application Performance Platform™
Riverbed Steelhead is the industry’s #1 WAN optimisation solution that accelerates the delivery of applications to the branch and from the cloud, and allows IT to prioritise delivery of mission-critical applications over the fastest networks. Riverbed is the only leader in the latest “Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimisation Controllers” and has been in the leaders’ quadrant for six years in a row. In January 2014, Steelhead was recognised by InfoWorld with a Technology of the Year Award for the eighth time. Riverbed pioneered WAN optimisation in 2004 with unique innovations for application and data streamlining across the WAN and Internet to deliver the best end-user experience regardless of location, network or device while dramatically reducing network bandwidth.

In a world where application performance equals business performance, Riverbed offers the most complete platform to enable organisations to embrace location-independent computing, so that business objectives – not technical constraints – drive how applications and data are delivered. The Riverbed Application Performance Platform is a set of integrated solutions that give companies the flexibility to host applications and data in the locations that best serve the business while ensuring the flawless delivery of those apps to better leverage global resources, radically reduce the cost of running their business and maximise employee productivity.