Local IT performance company, Riverbed Technology, has announced its mobile WAN optimisation solution, Steelhead Mobile 3.1, which provides enterprises with flexibility in deploying new technologies without sacrificing user productivity.
With Steelhead Mobile 3.1, enterprises and governments can take advantage of performance optimisations for Citrix virtual desktops and key Microsoft enterprise applications and protocols for mobile workers.
This is according to Christo Briedenhann, country manager: Africa at Riverbed, who says that in addition, Riverbed is introducing a mobile WAN optimisation solution for organisations deploying Apple Mac laptop computers across their mobile workforces.
“As organisations adapt their infrastructure for the modern workforce, greater flexibility is required,” he says. “Centralisation of data continues to be a top priority to reduce IT infrastructure costs, but challenges such as remote locations, inconsistent links, and high-latency environments and slow application performance significantly impact the productivity of knowledge workers when they are working remotely.
“In addition to centralisation, organisations are incorporating new technologies across their global workforces, such as virtual desktops, and supporting new enterprise platforms, such as Apple Macs, which leave organisations struggling to provide a consistent user experience for mobile workers.
“Steelhead Mobile 3.1 provides organisations with enhanced performance optimisations to overcome the challenges presented by a modern infrastructure, resulting in a more productive mobile workforce.”
Enterprises have discovered that virtual desktop performance across the WAN suffers due to bandwidth restrictions and the impact of latency, which in turn impacts end-user productivity. Steelhead Mobile 3.1 provides functionality to improve Citrix performance for mobile workers.
In addition, the enhanced functionality makes it easier for organisations to get the most from their Citrix deployments by simplifying configuration. This combination of speed and simplicity allows organisations to enjoy all of the benefits of providing virtual desktops across the WAN without concern for performance.
“With these enhancements to Steelhead Mobile, Riverbed provides a complete WAN optimisation solution to accelerate Citrix traffic from data centres to branch offices to remote and small office users, making their virtual desktop performance faster than ever before,” says Briedenhann.
Built on the same Riverbed Optimisation System (RiOS) that powers the Steelhead appliances and Virtual Steelhead, the Steelhead Mobile Mac client software allows mobile workers using Apple Macs to enjoy improved access and increased performance.
“With many mobile Mac users choosing to run Mac and PC applications simultaneously, Steelhead Mobile 3.1 provides the flexibility to accelerate whichever applications they need, independent of the underlying operating system. Additionally, the Steelhead Mobile Mac client can optimise Windows applications running in VMware Fusion, enabling organisations to optimise applications in both a Windows and Mac operating system with a single client licence.”
Further, Steelhead Mobile 3.1 Riverbed provides enhanced optimisations for key Microsoft applications, including:
* Exchange 2010 Application Optimisation: Steelhead Mobile 3.1 is the first mobile WAN optimisation solution to officially support both network and application layer optimisations for Exchange 2010.
* Secure Acceleration for Encrypted MAPI: With the release of Exchange 2007 and 2010, Microsoft enabled encryption by default, forcing administrators to choose between security and performance. Steelhead Mobile 3.1 optimises encrypted MAPI for mobile workers, improving response times by up to 45 times.
* SharePoint and Microsoft Online: Steelhead Mobile 3.1 builds on the existing Web application optimisations for SharePoint that improve document check-in and check-out times by up to 30 times.
These additional optimisations for SharePoint reduce latency effects and speed response times by up to 30 percent, providing users with LAN-like speeds across the WAN for navigation within the SharePoint Portal.
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Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the IT performance company. The Riverbed family of wide area network (WAN) optimisation solutions liberates businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility - all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers. Thousands of companies with distributed operations use Riverbed to make their IT infrastructure faster, less expensive and more responsive. Additional information about Riverbed is available at http://www.riverbed.com.
Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead, Virtual Steelhead, RiOS, Interceptor, Think Fast, the Riverbed logo, Mazu, Profiler and Cascade are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
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