News

posted on 25 February 2008 15:38

Riverbed, a wide area file services supplier (WAFS), has launched v5.0 of its RIOS which is the only product to accelerate Exchange 2007  Oracle 11i at the application level.

Users of RiOS 5.0 will see additional performance improvements of up to 10X for their Web applications.

RIOS (Riverbed Optimisation System) 5.0 better accelerates Exchange (application-level MAPI 2K7 protocol), Oracle 11i (HTTP mode), ERP, CRM, SharePoint and others, and has a hierarchical quality of service (QoS). It is the operating system for Riverbed's SteelHead appliances which are located either end of a WAN link and connect remote and branch offices to central offices, enabling the distant offices to eliminate many local servers.

TCP/IP traffic is optimised by reducing the chattiness of the protocol. Also RIOS deduplicates traffic such that pointers to duplicated file components are sent rather than the far lengthier ones and zeros.

Riverbed has more than 3,500 customers using tens of thousands of SteelHead appliances. They enable customers to consolidate
servers and storage centrally whilst providing access across the WAN at LAN or near LAN speed.

The hierarchical QoS means that a WAN circuit's bandwidth can be divided such that different types of traffic, such as VOIP and CIFS, get individually-allocated shares of the bandwidth enabling predictable service levels.

Riverbed has also added a RIOS Services Platform enabling a remote SteelHead appliance to hprovide printer server functionality - CUPS and SAMBA - and Proxy File Services, and also function as a streaming media server using WOWZA media server. A single media stream can be sent to a remote office from where SteelHead fans it out to multiple users, thus saving on WAN bandwidth.

Riverbed will enable its parters to add additional functionality to remote SteelHead appliances which will be integrated into RIOS. The company expects to announce more applications, or virtualised edge services, later.

Justin Marthaler, IT, Strand Associates, Inc., said: ""With the RSP, Strand can run local branch services like print servers on the Steelhead appliance without the need for a dedicated server. Steelhead appliances already enabled consolidation for most of our services in small branch offices; now, running Steelhead appliances with the RSP we feel more comfortable setting up branch offices without a dedicated server."]

"This will save us $10,000 to $15,000 in equipment costs for new offices, and that doesn't include the continued cost of maintaining additional servers. The RSP gives us the flexibility to leverage our investment in Steelhead appliances even further, and we're excited about the capability to run additional applications and services in the future."

Other enhancements include encryption of data on SteelHead appliance disks and a new management GUI with role-based administration. There is also enhanced SSL acceleration with encrypted data being first decrypted, then its travel across the WAN
accelerated with re-encryption at the far end. (It's not possible to accelerate the WAN passage of encrypted data in encrypted form.)

RIOS also has algorithms that recognise large data transfers and, if the appliances disks get saturated, RIOS switches to compression from de-duplicating the traffic and continues in that way until the SteelHead appliance disk saturation is over.

Zeus Kerravala, an enterprise research SVP at the Yankee Group, said: "WAN optimisation has become a key initiative for the improvement of applications and Riverbed's continued leadership in speed and breadth of applications makes them a vendor that we recommend be on any evaluating company’s short list.”

Increasingly WAFS performance improvement is going to need application-aware software and Riverbed's RIOS 5 reflects that trend.

RiOS 5.0 will be generally available in March 2008 and customers on service contracts will automatically receive it.