Riverbed Technology, the IT performance company, has introduced new solutions for both applications and storage in public cloud environments that build on its success in enabling organisations large and small to build private clouds.
These new offerings, in combination with Riverbed's existing wide area network (WAN) optimisation and visibility solutions, will help IT organisations deliver to globally connected enterprises anytime, anywhere IT performance - without requiring changes to their existing infrastructure.
At a publicly webcast cloud launch event in New York City and at live events in the San Francisco Bay Area and London, Riverbed demonstrated the benefits of its two new solutions, Riverbed Cloud Steelhead and Riverbed Whitewater.
Participating in the worldwide launch with Riverbed were cloud providers Amazon, AT&T, BT, EMC, Nirvanix and Orange Business Services. In addition, Riverbed customers AVST, International Justice Mission, Pump Solutions Group and Razorfishare presented their real-world experiences using the new solutions in public cloud environments.
To embrace globalisation and empower employees in remote offices, IT departments have traditionally deployed rich resources at the enterprise edge. To overcome the complexity of this model, many global enterprises have consolidated their IT resources into private clouds. However, as data moves farther from users at the edge, distance slows performance. Global enterprises have deployed WAN optimisation and visibility solutions to help overcome this issue. Today, more than 8 700 enterprises worldwide depend on Riverbed to understand, optimise and consolidate their IT infrastructure.
As organisations begin to incorporate public cloud into their IT strategies, they find that the same performance issues that impact private clouds and IT consolidation projects challenge them in public cloud environments.
“IT organisations at globally connected enterprises are charged with delivering highly efficient and secure IT, while still providing a rich experience to end-users at the edge,” says Eric Wolford, senior vice-president of marketing and business development at Riverbed. “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. Riverbed helps deliver flexible, accelerated performance without requiring IT organisations to make changes to their current architecture. And, as new vendors and approaches are adopted, Riverbed will be there to deliver the performance that enterprises require in simple, easy to deploy and manage solutions.”
Unleashing the power of applications in the cloud
In order to both accelerate the migration of data to the public cloud and improve performance for applications hosted in the public cloud, Riverbed has introduced the new Riverbed Cloud Steelhead. By overcoming application and network performance problems, Cloud Steelhead instances accelerate the process of migrating data and applications to the public cloud and speed up access to that data and those applications from anywhere.
Cloud Steelhead v1.0 will initially integrate with Amazon EC2 and Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). To ensure seamless cloud integration, Cloud Steelhead instances will offer the “Steelhead Discovery Agent” that provides a new form of transparent cloud interception, which ensures that WAN optimisation can be used in highly automated, virtualised environments where the physical location of the customer's server might change at any time; a subscription-based pricing model that enables cloud-like economics for WAN optimisation; a “Riverbed Cloud Portal” for simple, portal-based management; and easy cloning, which will allow administrators to use their existing Cloud Steelhead settings and configurations to bring new Cloud Steelhead instances online quickly and easily.
Unleashing the power of cloud storage
Enterprises are looking to enrich their data protection strategies further with cloud storage, enabling them to securely move data off-site without investing in a secondary data centre, accelerate recovery times, drive down the cost of backup and pay for storage only as they need it. By extending its acceleration and deduplication capabilities to cloud storage, Riverbed will provide organisations with a fast, secure and cost-efficient method to seamlessly integrate cloud storage into their existing backup infrastructure and disaster recovery strategies.
Introduced at the launch, the new Riverbed Whitewater appliance, a cloud storage accelerator targeting backup and select archive workloads, provides a simple, efficient way to offsite data to cloud storage environments powered by EMC Atmos, AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service and Amazon S3.
Industry support for Riverbed Whitewater and Riverbed Cloud Steelhead
Read what Riverbed partners have said about the impact the Riverbed Whitewater appliance and Riverbed Cloud Steelhead will have on accelerating the globally connected enterprise.
“As companies continue to focus on accelerating growth and reducing costs, many are turning to cloud storage to gain the efficiencies their business demands. As the foundation for building internal and external clouds, EMC Atmos is designed to simplify service providers' and enterprises' ability to build and deliver cloud storage solutions to their customers. Together, Riverbed Whitewater and EMC Atmos accelerate cloud storage for enterprise data protection and offer cost-effective and secure backup and recovery solutions.”- Mike Feinberg, senior vice-president, EMC Cloud Infrastructure Group.
“Cloud Steelhead provides Orange Business Services with an extension to its existing successful Enterprise Application Management service. Customers can now seamlessly transition to cloud-based applications and benefit from the same application performance and capabilities that they enjoy today.”- Richard Heaps, head of Product Management - Consulting & Solutions Integration, Orange Business Services.
“At Nirvanix, our sole focus is delivering cloud storage services that are designed from the ground up for the enterprise, which is why we are very excited to be part of Riverbed Whitewater. A large portion of our customers use Riverbed technology and can now leverage best in class deduplication and WAN acceleration to securely move massive amounts of data to our global network.”- Geoff Tudor, senior vice-president of Strategy and Business Development, Nirvanix.
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