New Riverbed Steelhead DX Edition 8000 Appliance

Riverbed Technology, Inc. has expanded its Steelhead WAN optimization product family, delivering a new purpose-built appliance – the Steelhead DX Edition 8000 Series – to address the needs of datacenter-to-datacenter data replication workloads, delivering up to 60x WAN performance acceleration and up to 99% bandwidth reduction.

With the new series, organizations can transfer and protect more data more often, with less risk and cost and recover data far more rapidly to improve BC.

“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,” said Paul O’Farrell, SVP and GM, Steelhead products group, Riverbed. “The new Steelhead DX Edition eliminates distance between datacenters as a barrier to achieving true location-independent computing, which in this case means that data can be moved, stored and backed-up regardless of where facilities are located, but with performance similar to a local area network. Only Riverbed offers a complete solution for both large-scale branch-to-datacenter and datacenter-to-datacenter environments.”

Taking the Network Out of BC Equation
WAN performance plays a central role in strategic business initiatives such as datacenter consolidation, centralization of branch servers and storage and transitioning from tape-based backup to WAN-based data replication. Given the growth in data combined with these initiatives that are consolidating more data in fewer datacenters, organizations are struggling to maintain the service-level agreements, such as RPO/RTO, associated with mission-critical BC and DR processes. To transfer and protect more data more often, organizations must ensure fast and predictable WAN performance despite common WAN performance impairments – high latency, packet loss, limited bandwidth and competition among applications, while protecting the bottom line by eliminating the unnecessary costs and delays associated with WAN infrastructure upgrades.

“Maintaining fast and predictable WAN performance into and between datacenters has become critical for many of today’s enterprises,” said Brad Casemore, research director, IDC. “Protecting data within and across multiple datacenters is essential to keeping a business online and operational. The challenge is doing so without generating ever increasing operational cost and risk, even as data sets and replication workloads continue to increase.”

The Steelhead DX Edition 8000 Series features software and hardware purpose-built and optimized for datacenter-to-datacenter workloads. Supporting up to 2Gb/s of optimized WAN capacity and up to 10Gb/s of optimized LAN capacity while optimizing up to 10,000 TCP and UDP application flows, it delivers value for accelerating data transfers over long distance.

In addition, the solution provides an optimizations for data replication applications such as NetApp SnapMirror and EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF), providing performance, enhanced visibility and fine-grain control of data replication processes end-to-end across the WAN.

Steelhead WAN Optimization Solutions
and Riverbed Application Performance Platform
Steelhead is the #1 WAN optimization solution that accelerates the delivery of applications to the branch and from the cloud, and allows IT to prioritize delivery of mission-critical applications over the fastest networks.

Riverbed is the only leader in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers and has been in the leaders’ quadrant for six years in a row. In January 2014, Steelhead was recognized by InfoWorld with a Technology of the Year Award for the eighth time.

Riverbed pioneered WAN optimization in 2004 with innovations for application and data streamlining across the WAN and Internet to deliver the best end-user experience regardless of location, network or device while reducing network bandwidth.

In a world where application performance equals business performance, the company offers a complete platform to enable organizations to embrace location-independent computing, so that business objectives – not technical constraints – drive how applications and data are delivered.

The Application Performance Platform is a set of integrated solutions that give companies the flexibility to host applications and data in the locations that best serve the business while ensuring the flawless delivery of those apps to better leverage global resources, reduce the cost of running their business and maximize employee productivity.

The Steelhead DX Edition 8000 Series is available.

“EMC is a global leader in helping IT departments store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset – information – in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way,” said Jon Siegal, senior director of product marketing for the EMC Corp.‘s enterprise and mid-range systems division. “As a member of the EMC Business Partner Program for Technology Connect Partners, Riverbed’s new DX platform helps customers protect more data more often across the WAN by delivering the fast and predictable WAN performance needed by business-critical data replication workloads.“

“Riverbed provides the most complete solution for optimizing WAN performance between datacenters,” said David Titov, practice director at Trace3. “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.”