New Riverbed Features!

New Features in the Riverbed® Optimization System (RiOS™) Version 6.0

Riverbed has new optimizations for Mac clients, Citrix, Oracle E-Business 11i & 12, SharePoint & other web apps, and central printing. Disaster recovery, visibility and simplicity, and the RSP are also greatly enhanced with many new features.

Speed

With RiOS 6.0, Riverbed enables even faster performance for enterprise business applications and data protection and enhances manageability to deliver the market-leading WAN optimization solution. Through its comprehensive approach, Riverbed accelerates access to information to improve productivity and reduce costs. With more client and application specific optimizations, improved flexibility, and simplified management for large-scale deployments, Riverbed extends its technological leadership and helps customers do more.

Mac CIFS clients - acceleration up to 60X. As Mac clients become more popular in the workplace, IT must deliver the same level of service for them as for Windows. Now Macs can benefit from faster WAN access to Windows file shares.

Citrix ICA – up to 40% faster response times and 83% bandwidth reduction. Many Citrix customers have struggled with performance across the WAN, impacting end user acceptance and productivity. Riverbed now has simplified configuration and enhanced QoS capabilities for Citrix delivering both bandwidth reduction and up to 40% better response times.

Web Applications – up to 20X to 50X faster. Riverbed expands its existing Web traffic acceleration capabilities so the performance of enterprise Web applications is even better with a new object pre-fetch table. Organizations running SharePoint, SAP NetWeaver, Microsoft or Siebel CRM, or other applications will see up to 20X performance gains. RiOS 6.0 delivers up to 50X acceleration for Oracle 11i and 12 applications like E-Business Suite, now including those running on SUN JRE.

Centralized Printing – up to 74% less WAN traffic. Printing across the WAN suffers heavy performance penalties, and can cause a lot of extra load on the network. Riverbed has extended our CIFS optimizations to work for Windows print traffic, improving data reduction and adding up to 4X faster performance.

Scalability

The demands of data protection continue to grow, especially for high-end data center to data center replication, but data workloads vary significantly by application and environment, as do the goals of optimization, so a single global setting isn’t always enough. RiOS 6.0 includes Adaptive Data Streamlining to dynamically allocate Steelhead appliance resources (disk, CPU, memory) to provide maximum performance for disaster recovery and applications. Data streamlining can be performed in either memory (for much higher throughput) or on disk (for greater bandwidth savings) for both data de-duplication and compression, and to apply these techniques to individual data flows as appropriate.

Simplicity

Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) Enhancements - The RSP enables the delivery of branch office services on the Steelhead appliance using a VMware-based environment. This allows customers to deploy best-of-breed software in a selfcontained partition to minimize the hardware infrastructure footprint at the branch office. New RSP feature include enhanced Virtual Disk Support allowing easy growth of packages, an enhanced watchdog heartbeat to monitor virtual machine health, and the ability to run RSP on virtual-inpath Steelhead appliances.

RiOS 6.0 continues to improve Riverbed’s industry-leading SSL acceleration functionality by making it even easier to setup and manage for better simplicity and scalability. Enhancements include server IP autodiscovery, wildcards to quickly add a range of servers, and re-use of recent secure sessions for improved performance.

Visibility and Manageability Enhancements Visibility is critical for manageability, efficient enterprise wide scalability, business value and infrastructure analysis, and not least, troubleshooting and diagnosis of problems. This category is well represented with a variety of features that provide information not just on the operation of the Steelhead appliances, but also tie into the wider network operation and management tools that customers may already have or soon adopt. Integration with the broader IT environment creates more insight and easier management, and ensures Riverbed operates smoothly even in secure environments.

New Features

Include support for NetFlow v9, SNMP v3 and more detailed MIBs, an XML SOAP API, pass through traffic reporting, optimization benefit reporting, transparency enhancements for stateful packet inspection firewalls, a unified trust model for Steelhead appliances based on self signed or well known certificate authorities, SSL encryption of inner channel communications, and easier set up of SMB signing compatibility even across multiple domains.