News

posted on 01 May 2008 20:43

Silver Peak's attack on Riverbed for screwing up AutoCAD 2007 file transfers was unfounded according to a Taneja Group-validated Riverbed report.

AutoDesk delivered a new version of its popular software, AutoCAD 2007 last year. It emerged that suppliers of WAN data acceleration services (WDS) that relied in whole or part on de-duplicating block-level aspects of transmitted files, delivered poor results with AutoCAD 2007, compared to the previous AutoCAD 2004 version.

Silver Peak attacked Riverbed over this. A Silver Peak spokesperson said: "Riverbed made its name selling into design firms – where AutoCAD is HUGE. Now, they are abandoning these customers."

In fact RiverBed accelerated AutoCAD 2007 files across a wide area network (WAN) link more than Silver Peak and all de-duping WDS suppliers, such as Blue Coat, Cisco and Riverbed, were affected by AutoDesk's use of byte scrambling when writing AutoCAD 2007 files to disk.

The Riverbed report - AutoCAD 2007 vs. AutoCAD 2004: The Effect on Wide-area Data Services Solutions makes it abundantly clear that it is a multi-supplier problem and that Riverbed still exceeds Silver Peak performance in shipping AutoCAD 2007 files across a WAN link.

The report states: "This report, validated by Taneja Group, a leading storage analyst firm, describes test results of AutoCAD 2007 used in conjunction with four WDS (wide area data services) products, and compares those test results to the same experiments using AutoCAD 2004. The vendors tested were Riverbed, Cisco, Blue Coat and Silver Peak. The validated and objective test results outlined below show the following findings:

• All products that use de-duplication are affected by the new file format
• Customers can still see significant time savings by using WDS appliances, even with the new file format
• Vendors who use de-duplication and claim to be unaffected by this are not providing complete or accurate information
• Individual network conditions, traffic, bandwidth"

Alan Salditch, Riverbed's VP for Product Marketing and Alliances, when asked if the report made Silver Peak look foolish, said: "I think that's an under-statement. They were trying to make hay and get some PR out of it. ... I think the Silver Peak marketing guy tried to make this into a PR issue and they were dead wrong."

He also said: "Silver Peak is, frankly, quite a minor competitor."

AutoDesk is working on a patch to AutoCAD 2007 to try and remedy the problem after representations from various WADS suppliers such as Cisco and Riverbed.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}