Riverbed Boosts WAN Optimization

The new offering features a more efficient way to handle multiple TCP sessions coupled with a 10GB Ethernet interface and solid-state disk drives to improve performance. The drives, according to Nik Rouda, Riverbed director of product marketing, are the first usage of SSDs in a WAN optimization appliance.

According to Rouda, activities such as disaster recovery need more bandwidth and speed to accomplish the backup and recovery process within a reasonable window. Riverbed is positioning the Steelhead 7050 appliance as a high-end offering designed to accommodate any application that needs to scale up to 100,000 concurrent TCP connections with 1Gb-per-second WAN side throughput.

Rouda also said that IT organizations could opt to consolidate a number of existing WAN optimization appliances by replacing them with the 7050, or cluster multiple 7050 appliances together to handle the most demanding application scenarios.

According to Rouda, the Riverbed appliances are more efficient than rival offerings because they are based on a unified data store in the operating system, versus other approaches that slice data up across multiple processors.