Riverbed Technology, the technology and market leader in wide-area data services, has announced an OEM agreement to embed VMware software as the preferred virtualisation platform for the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), a virtualised service delivery solution within Steelhead appliances.
With the VMware platform inside Steelhead appliances, enterprises can further consolidate their IT infrastructure and improve manageability by running up to five remote office virtual edge services, without the need for separate dedicated servers. This approach will allow them to improve asset utilisation, operational efficiency and business agility, whilst helping to control IT costs and ensure end-user satisfaction. Services currently available for deployment on the RSP include streaming media, print services, and DNS/DHCP/IPAM.
"There is a strong trend within enterprises toward centralising servers and consolidating IT infrastructure," says Joe Skorupa, research vice president for Gartner. "At the same time there are key applications and services that are required in remote locations. Working together, WAN optimisation and virtualisation technologies allow organisations to move forward with efforts to lower operational and capital costs through IT consolidation, whilst also ensuring that end-users have access to essential applications and services."
VMware-based virtualised edge services: RSP VMware provides Riverbed with the most robust and widely deployed virtualisation platform available. More than 120 000 customers, including all of the Fortune 100, have used the VMware platform, which enables them to virtualise their data centres and help ensure business continuity.
Riverbed Steelhead appliances accelerate the performance of applications between data centres, remote offices and mobile workers by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times. The Steelhead products make it possible for companies to consolidate IT and improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, whilst improving staff productivity and collaboration.
The RSP, which will be virtualised by VMware, is an extensible data services platform that allows customers to deploy best-of-breed edge services which formerly required dedicated servers as virtual appliances. Customers can deploy these virtual appliances directly on Steelhead products to further minimise the hardware infrastructure footprint at the branch office.
"Running the RSP on VMware puts us in a position to offer our customers the most robust and widely-deployed virtualisation software available right on our Steelhead platform," says Christo Briedenhann, country manager: South Africa, Riverbed. "Together, VMware and Riverbed will enable server-less remote office computing, which drives IT efficiencies, while providing our customers with high performance computing and productivity for all their knowledge workers, wherever they are."
With VMware as the underlying virtualisation platform within RSP, Riverbed will be able to offer up to five virtual appliances on each Steelhead appliance. Riverbed will work with VMware to encourage Riverbed Technology Alliance partners to join the VMware Technology Alliance Partner programme and to validate RSP virtual appliances to help ensure seamless integration with VMware Infrastructure 3, the industry-leading virtualisation and management suite. RSP virtual appliances will also be listed on the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace - an online directory of virtual appliances, with more than 900 available for download. The initial third-party applications and services qualified on the new VMware-powered RSP are:
* Secure Computing Secure SnapGear firewall technology
* Infoblox NIOS software for DNS/DHCP/IPAM
* Wowza media server for streaming media
* Print services
In addition, customers will be able to place their own software modules, such as VMDKs, Microsoft Windows, etc., on the RSP.
While RSP adoption will be positioned to gain momentum as a platform for delivering these virtualised edge data services to remote offices, Riverbed will continue to expand the availability of newer applications - such as application-level sensors, remote management, and other enterprise applications that need a software presence in the remote office - by distributing them as virtual appliances.
"VMware is excited that Riverbed has based RSP on the VMware virtualisation platform," says Shekar Ayyar, vice president of infrastructure alliances at VMware. "The combined solution will allow customers to extend their virtualised environments into their branch offices more easily and efficiently, so they can deploy additional services on Riverbed appliances without compromising speed, availability and productivity."
Riverbed Steelhead appliances help enterprises dramatically speed up collaboration and move data across VMware environments, while at the same time allowing them to centralise and consolidate IT resources - all without sacrificing performance.
Steelhead Products
Riverbed WDS solutions enable organisations of all sizes to overcome a host of severe problems, including poor application performance and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. Steelhead products have been deployed in organisations ranging from the world's largest corporations with offices around the globe to small companies with several sites that are just miles apart. To learn more, view Riverbed's demo: www.riverbed.com/pr/jack.
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