Riverbed Bolsters Citrix, Macintosh Performance

Latency-sensitive Citrix terminal services and chatty Apple Macintosh systems have always suffered more performance degradation than most when it comes to wide area networks. But with the release of version 6.0 of the Riverbed Optimization System (RIOS), Riverbed Technology is upgrading the capabilities of its Steelhead application acceleration appliances to optimize the performance of applications running in these environments.

As applications are increasingly being accessed across the WAN, environments such as Citrix terminal services and Apple Macintosh clients that were originally designed to work on local area networks are becoming severely stressed. This issue has become especially acute as more IT organizations have consolidated servers.

With this latest upgrade, Riverbed claims it can reduce the amount of bandwidth consumed by Citrix applications by as much as 80 percent, which it says should allow an organization to deploy twice as many Citrix clients per server. In terms of Macintosh clients, Riverbed said IT organizations should expect to see as much as a 600 percent improvement in performance now that RIOS supports Apple’s CIFS.

The new release also optimizes the application performance of Web applications and adds support for Oracle 12 applications. In addition, Riverbed has improved its ability to support large file transfers during the disaster recovery process and simplified the management system for its Steelhead appliances.