Riverbed Speeds Remote Access for Windows 7

The provider of application acceleration appliances and software that optimizes wide area network performance has launched version 3.0 of it Steelhead Mobile software.

Steelhead Mobile 3.0 adds support for 64-bit client systems such as Windows 7 that are much more capable of consuming large amounts of network bandwidth. Steelhead eliminates the need for a dedicated application acceleration appliance on both sides of the WAN connection. Instead, the software for managing the remote connection to the WAN is embedded in the Riverbed software deployed on the client.

The debut of Steelhead Mobile 3.0 coincides with the arrival of Windows 7, which includes its own software, called BranchCache, which is designed to accelerate application performance over WAN links. But Riverbed officials said that like most Microsoft utilities, they expect customers to find third-party alternatives to be substantially faster and easier to deploy, use and manage.

With the rise of more latency-sensitive applications across the enterprise, application acceleration technologies are becoming increasingly important tools for maintaining application performance levels. For example, applications running over HTTP and HTTPS transports are 60 times faster when accessed using Steelhead Mobile 3.0.

In addition, Riverbed has added a new capability in this release, called Branch Warming, that allows multiple users to share data references between various data stores, thereby reducing the amount of time each client has to establish a caching history with any source of data across the WAN.