Riverbed Technology (Nasdaq: RVBD) has outlined, at its financial analyst conference, its vision for the optimisation of data that would enable organisations to streamline the manipulation, movement and storage of information. With Riverbed as the core enabling optimisation technology, data inefficiencies and bottlenecks would be removed throughout the enterprise. Technology infrastructure and applications can finally support the demands of the 21st Century.
To realise its vision, Riverbed will build on its record of execution with WAN optimisation and extend its core technology to data centre storage and server infrastructure with its new product family, the Atlas appliance. The combination of the Steelhead and Atlas product families will allow organisations to eliminate data's inherent inefficiencies, streamlining data and allowing it to flow almost effortlessly throughout the enterprise, from creation to communication to storage.
With the Atlas appliance, Riverbed will do for its customers' data at rest what Steelhead products have done for their data in motion - eliminate up to 95% of redundant data, which typically burdens IT infrastructure by slowing down access to data and applications and increasing costs and operational overhead of data management. The Riverbed vision will lead to lower costs, enhanced user experience, improved manageability, scalability and greater productivity.
"Riverbed is the clear market leader in WAN optimisation," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Their technology fits naturally at every point of infrastructure - wherever having optimised data will bring a positive effect - and I can't think of a place where it wouldn't. Riverbed has created - and then dominated - the WAN optimisation market, but it isn't about that - it's about optimising the data. The WAN was just the first place to prove the holistic value of data optimisation. Riverbed's technologies have made obvious and significant impact inside organisations with their existing solutions, but the real opportunities lie in the promise of extending that vision much deeper into the enterprise."
Today, organisations of all sizes have distributed workforces. The distributed nature of business has led to massive data and IT complexity in order to meet the collaboration, compliance, and performance needs of the organisation. The result of this complexity is a data explosion, as the same content is replicated, manipulated, moved and stored countless times. IT organisations are straining under the burden that this inefficient data storage puts on their application, network, server and storage infrastructure. As a result, the business can't move quickly enough to capitalise on new opportunities and innovations because of these data bottlenecks.
"Data and how it is handled is critical to the distributed and collaborative nature of business in the 21st century. How an organisation accesses, shares and stores its information are key business differentiators," said Eric Wolford, senior vice-president, marketing and business development at Riverbed. "When IT infrastructure is overloaded with redundant data, there are efficiency and cost impacts across the organisation. Our vision is to eliminate these inefficiencies through removing redundant data at every point between the data centre and the end-user. The implications of this approach affect IT infrastructure and budgets, the user experience, and business processes."
With its market leading and award-winning WAN optimisation products, Riverbed exploited the redundancies inherent in data and overcame the performance limitations of applications and data transfers over WANs, speeding access by up to 100X and allowing organisations to consolidate their IT infrastructure, reduce bandwidth and IT costs and make employees more productive. Riverbed will apply its underlying architectural approach and technology advantage to storage and servers in the data centre.
"Riverbed revolutionised the way organisations share data across the WAN. We came to market in 2004 with an architectural strength that allows us to continue to lead the WAN optimisation market. When this unique approach of logically representing data was applied to the WAN, we were able to accelerate our customers' application performance by up to 100X," said Wolford. "Our vision is to extend that fundamental underlying architectural approach to data centre storage and server infrastructure."
Riverbed Atlas appliance - Increasing storage capacity
The Atlas appliance is designed to allow organisations to increase their existing primary file storage capacity by up to 10X - without any changes to their existing storage infrastructure. And, when applied to backup data, the improvement can be greater than 20X. The hardware appliances leverage the de-duplication functionality of Steelhead appliances throughout an organisation to remove up to 90% of existing data from primary file storage. The Atlas appliance does not store any data - enterprises will continue to use their existing storage infrastructure to do what it does best, which is storing and managing data. The Atlas appliance is designed to help scale existing file storage by enabling customers' existing file servers to serve more users and deliver a larger amount of data per device.
"The Riverbed vision is grounded in the over 50 000 Steelhead appliances shipped to our more than 4 500 customers worldwide. With the Atlas appliance, we are doing for data at rest what we have always done for data in motion," continued Wolford. "Customers who realise the Riverbed vision will have less data to manage across their end-to-end IT infrastructure, use less bandwidth, cut their IT infrastructure needs and reduce their overall IT budget - all while dramatically improving knowledge worker productivity and accelerating business processes."
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