New Riverbed Optimization System provides advanced acceleration for cloud services 7 June, 2010 By Mark Cox

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"This release highlights just how valuable the combination of acceleration and flexibility can be," said Joe Ghory, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Riverbed. "RiOS 6.1 introduces enhancements to overcome performance challenges in moving to the private cloud, and it contains a number of industry firsts."

A key point, Ghory said, is the introduction of specific optimization for the most commonly used applications, including Exchange 2010, enhanced Sharepoint optimization, and Lotus Notes.

"In Exchange 2003, encryption was default off, and in 2010 it's on, and that sudden enablement has a bandwidth and performance cost that affects performance," Ghory said. RiOS 6.1 delivers enhanced latency optimization and data reduction improvements for both encrypted and unencrypted Exchange 2010 traffic, delivering data reductions up to 95%. By taking advantage of these features, organizations can efficiently deliver Exchange traffic over the WAN and, as a result, consolidate previously distributed Exchange servers back to the data center.

Handling of Microsoft SharePoint has also been upgraded.

"Our understanding of the application has improved," Ghory said. "With this release, we are announcing SharePoint optimizations that give 50 percent faster page refresh time than before." This is due to accelerated traffic at both the network layer and application layer eliminating unnecessary round trips associated with SharePoint authentication requests, enabling Steelhead appliances to deliver enhanced SharePoint optimization and reduce application latency and response times.

Riverbed is also introducing the ability to optimize and accelerate encrypted traffic for Lotus Notes 8.5, making Riverbed the first WAN optimization vendor to optimize traffic for the latest release of this software. This feature also provides latency optimization for Domino Server and Notes Client replication, making Riverbed the WAN optimization vendor with the broadest coverage for Domino and Lotus Notes replication use cases.

Broad cloud optimization has also been introduced in RiOS, enabling organizations to overcome the performance hurdles of moving to cloud environments. RiOS 6.1 optimizes both encrypted and unencrypted traffic for Exchange Online and provides Layer 7 application acceleration for SharePoint Online, ensuring enhanced performance for organizations leveraging Microsoft cloud-based services. Riverbed is the only WAN optimization vendor to provide enhanced acceleration and optimization for organizations using Microsoft Online for SharePoint and Exchange.

RiOS 6.1 also adds enhanced optimizations for disaster recovery (DR) performance initiatives by reducing DR traffic and accelerating replication times between data centers. It provides intelligent storage networking protocol enhancements to ensure better performance, greater scale and easier management for enterprises with large data center environments.

Enhanced storage networking optimizations provided by Riverbed in RiOS 6.1 include EMC SRDF optimizations. Riverbed customers that use EMC Symmetrix VMAX and Symmetrix DMX will benefit from improved data reduction and throughput due to the RiOS 6.1s enhanced EMC SRDF optimization. RiOS 6.1 also offers a new auto-negotiate compression feature for EMC SRDF, enabling simplified management and increased availability.

"EMC has tuned this for us so that it gives the same result as EMC services coming out and disabling compression," Ghory said. "It eliminates the professional services part of it while getting optimization."

RiOS 6.1 provides storage networking optimizations for FCIP traffic over Brocade 7500 and Cisco MDS gateways. These enhancements speed FCIP traffic to and across the network on both a protocol and a network level.

Finally, improvements to the central management console allows it to scale more. The CMC 8150 and CMC-VE can now manage up to 2000 Steelheads.