Riverbed Takes WAN Optimization to the Cloud

To enable this effort, Riverbed is developing an implementation of the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) and other software elements of its Steelhead application acceleration appliances and deploying them on top of a new virtual machine infrastructure that can run on any size server.

Customers will still have to have some form of a local implementation of Riverbed’s application acceleration software to communicate with application acceleration services in the cloud, but the new implementation should make it easier for cloud computing providers to scale WAN optimization services to unprecedented levels of performance.

In addition, Riverbed announced that it intends to make it possible to deliver iSCSI-based storage-area network services via the cloud using its technology. That implementation may not be suited for high-performance SAN applications, but for the majority of the market that simply needs access to iSCSI storage, any new cloud service should be able to match the levels of performance that most customers see on an iSCSI implementation on a local area network, said Riverbed officials.

By delivering application acceleration technologies in the cloud, Riverbed officials said they expect cloud computing providers to be able to overcome many of the challenges currently associated with delivering high performance and latency-sensitive applications via the cloud.