Appliance Deployment Featured Article

Riverbed (News - Alert) Technology, a provider of application performance infrastructure technology, has recently expanded its Steelhead wide area network (WAN) optimization product family with the addition of the Steelhead DX Edition 8000 Series appliance, which will serve datacenter-to-datacenter data replication workloads.

The new appliance is said to deliver up to 60x WAN performance acceleration and up to 99 percent bandwidth reduction. The company explained that with this solution, organizations can transfer and protect more data more easily and cost effectively, granting them the ability to quickly recover data and thereby improve business continuity.

Paul O’Farrell, senior vice president and general manager of Steelhead Products Group at Riverbed said, “The Steelhead product family is already the most complete WAN optimization solution in the market, and with this announcement we added another important and business-critical use case.” He added, “The new Steelhead DX edition can enable true location-independent computing which allows data to be moved, stored and backed-up irrespective of data center locations enabling a performance equal to that of a local area network. The solution serves both large-scale branch-to-datacenter and datacenter-to-datacenter environments.”

The Steelhead DX Edition 8000 Series is designed for datacenter-to-datacenter workloads, supporting up to 2 Gbps of optimized WAN capacity and up to 10 Gbps of optimized LAN capacity. It also optimizes up to 10,000 TCP and UDP (News - Alert) application flows, accelerating data transfers over long distances.

The solution features data replication applications like NetApp SnapMirror and EMC (News - Alert) symmetrix remote data facility (SRDF), which enhances performance, visibility and fine-grain control of data replication processes end-to-end across the WAN.

“Riverbed provides the most complete solution for optimizing WAN performance between datacenters,” said David Titov, practice director at Trace 3. “The predictably fast performance provided by the Steelhead DX Edition appliances, coupled with enhanced visibility and control of DR processes, allows our customers to sleep better at night knowing that their data replication workloads will complete on time every time, even in the presence of unforeseen changes in workload or network conditions.”