Riverbed Expands Offerings Available Through EMC Select Program

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced an expansion of its WAN optimization solutions available through the EMC Select Program.

Under this new agreement, EMC can now offer an expanded suite of optimization solutions from Riverbed to improve the performance of long-distance data replication, while accelerating access to storage and applications over wide area networks. A combination of new innovations from Riverbed and EMC can now help to deliver performance, visibility and control of long-distance replication over wide area networks.

Customers that take advantage of this relationship by deploying integrated solutions from Riverbed and EMC can now replicate data even faster, reducing their recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). As replication has emerged in the marketplace as a preferred strategy for more frequent and seamless protection of storage between data centers, many enterprises have deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances, powered by the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), with EMC solutions to accelerate disaster recovery (DR) operations.

Expanded Riverbed WAN Optimization Solutions
Available Through EMC Select Program
The EMC Select Program now includes a suite of solutions from Riverbed, including the following:

• Steelhead WAN optimization appliances – the line of physical Steelhead WAN optimization appliances
• Steelhead Mobile – a mobile WAN optimization solution to address the productivity challenges global organizations face when managing remote and mobile workforces
• Central Management Console – a turnkey solution that streamlines monitoring and management of Steelhead appliances worldwide
• Interceptor – an intelligent network device used to deliver scalable, high-capacity and highly-availability Steelhead appliance deployments

Among the Steelhead appliances that are now offered through the EMC Select Program is the Riverbed Steelhead 7050 model appliance. To deliver performance, flexibility and fault tolerance in large data centers and private cloud environments, the Riverbed Steelhead 7050 model appliance combines new levels of bandwidth and TCP session scalability with solid-state drives (SSD) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE). The Riverbed Steelhead 7050 model appliances WAN optimization appliances based entirely on SSDs, which minimize disk access times and provide the speed necessary to handle the most extreme data center workloads. This enables IT professionals to protect more data, more frequently, and across any distance.

"The advanced integration between RiOS and Symmetrix Remote Data Facility/Asynchronous (SRDF/A), along with the expansion of Riverbed WAN optimization solutions available through the EMC Select Program, underscores our long-term commitment in delivering solutions that lower costs while ensuring faster and more reliable data protection," said Brian Gallagher, president, Enterprise Storage Division, at EMC. "For more than 20 years, Symmetrix has been the trusted storage partner deployed in enterprise class, mission critical applications. SRDF/A is the most trusted and industry leading remote replication for DR and business continuity. Customers now can benefit from selecting a leading remote replication solution and the market-leading WAN optimization solution for more frequent and seamless protection of storage, be it in the data center, remote site or in the cloud, ensuring the highest levels of DR and business continuity."

New Levels of Performance, Control and Visibility
Steelhead appliances were first qualified by EMC E-Labs in 2009. Through collaboration with EMC, Riverbed has added fluency for EMC’s SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) into RiOS. These new developments deliver capabilities that improve the performance, control and visibility for SRDF over WANs:

• Enhanced performance and control: To improve overall efficiency and performance, Remote Data Facility (RDF)-selective optimization provides the ability to fine-tune optimization for individual RDF groups
• More visibility: To monitor the performance and health of SRDF traffic for each RDF group, RiOS provides RDF-level visibility through a command line interface (CLI)

Additionally, RiOS automatically negotiates Symmetrix compression settings for rapid deployment and optimal performance.

"As disaster recovery initiatives become increasingly important for IT organizations, customers have turned to us to accelerate replication times and reduce their bandwidth costs by removing huge amounts of repetitive data from the WAN," said Eric Wolford, executive vice president, marketing and business development, Riverbed. "Riverbed has worked closely with EMC to provide joint customers with a robust, easy-to-use high-performance WAN optimization solution that provides application-specific acceleration for SRDF operations, ensuring that organizations get the most out of their EMC investments."

Riverbed and EMC have an established history of delivering storage and WAN optimization solutions that accelerate DR processes while reducing overall IT costs for customers. Over the past year, Riverbed has worked with EMC E-Lab to qualify Steelhead appliances for EMC RecoverPoint, EMC SRDF/A (Asynchronous) for both Symmetrix VMAX and Symmetrix DMX, EMC MirrorView/A, EMC Celerra Replicator and EMC SAN Copy. EMC E-Lab qualifications mean that joint customers can deploy Riverbed WAN optimization solutions into their largest data centers.

"We run a highly virtualized environment that was eating up our bandwidth as we cross-replicated virtual machines between our two data centers. Working with EMC and Riverbed, we were able to increase replication performance and solve our bandwidth consumption problem without a costly bandwidth upgrade. Within the first 12 hours of the Steelhead appliances being in place, our bandwidth utilization went from 85-95 percent to 11 percent. As a result, we are able to implement a stronger disaster recovery strategy, deliver much higher SLAs to our customers, and shift the costs associated with a bandwidth upgrade to implement other critical IT initiatives," said Eric Tuley, Manager of IS Operations, Arbitration Forums, Inc.