Riverbed Overview
Riverbed
is best known for 'WAN Acceleration' via its range of Steelhead
Appliances.
The Riverbed "Wide-area Data Services" (WDS) approach
is unique and highly successful because it combines several different
categories of solution into a single, unified architecture and delivers
tangible benefits for organizations of all sizes including:
- Accelerating applications across the WAN
- Reducing WAN bandwidth utilization
- Enabling IT Consolidation
- Optimizing Disaster Recovery
- Accelerating mobile workers (see Riverbed Mobile)
With Riverbed, WAN speed problems can be addressed without incremental leased line costs or additional bandwidth, because Steelhead appliances reduce WAN traffic and accelerate global application performance by addressing latency and chatty protocols.
By deploying Riverbed on your WAN, you can typically expect the speed of all applications running over TCP to increase by 5 to 50 times and in some cases by up to 100 times. At the same time, your bandwidth utilization will typically drop by 65% to 95%.
Download the Riverbed Product Family Overview
How does Riverbed work?
Most WAN optimisation and QOS solutions tackle poor
performance at the network level only, or look to address issues with
one specific application. As a result, they yield barely 10% or 15% improvement
in application performance and bandwidth utilisation.
In contrast, Riverbed's integrated WDS solution simultaneously addresses
performance issues at the network, storage and application levels. It
also tackles bandwidth constraints, TCP 'chattiness' (a particular problem
on high latency networks), and the inherent inefficiencies of key applications
themselves that were originally designed to operate in a LAN environment.
Application Acceleration with Riverbed
The Riverbed Optimisation System (RiOS), is an integrated solution for accelerating applications over the WAN. It automatically optimises all applications that run over TCP along with specific applications such as databases, file sharing, email, and web applications (including HTTPS).
Typical speed improvements - in 'number of times' - in applications running across the WAN are shown below:
RiOS 6.0
Download the Technical Overview of RiOS 6.0
What's new with RiOS 6.0 - download the Feature Brief
Bandwidth Utilization reduction
Riverbed removes repetitive traffic from the WAN via its unique Data Streamlining algorithms. Data Streamlining stores WAN traffic on disk in a proprietary, application-independent form that can be reused by any application, any file or any user that sends or receives the same data.
Whether a client requests a file that has been renamed, emails an attachment or uses another application like FTP or a Web-based application, any traffic that has previously travelled across the network will not be retransmitted.
Instead, only a small reference to the data is sent to the Riverbed Steelhead appliance on the opposite side of the network. Riverbed's references are 16 bytes in length, yet can represent megabytes of data, which results in high levels of WAN bandwidth optimization.
The result is a typical reduction of between 60% and 95% of the data running across the WAN and the radical acceleration of applications, making them run in some cases up to 100 times faster.
What next?
