Riverbed Takes Steelhead Virtual

The company today announced the release of Virtual Steelhead, which allows IT organizations to deploy Riverbed’s WAN optimization software on top of a VMware virtual server.

While not intended to eliminate the need for physical appliances that in most cases will provide the same levels of  performance as the virtual appliance, Nik Rouda, Riverbed director of product marketing, says a virtual implementation of Steelhead will simplify deployment challenges for IT organizations that don’t want to manage another dedicated appliance.

In addition, Rouda noted that a virtual appliance also allows IT organizations with a dedicated team for managing virtualization to deploy WAN optimization services without having to ask the rest of the IT organization to deploy and manage another appliance.

Rouda added that as virtual machines begin to migrate across an enterprise network, network bottlenecks become a bigger issue as users access a remote virtual server. At the same time, the images on those virtual servers tend to get larger over time, which eventually adversely affects network performance.

Virtual Steelhead will be available in the third quarter.