Riverbed Technology, the application performance company, recently announced that the company has been positioned by Gartner in the Leaders Quadrant of the 2013 “Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimisation Controllers” authored by Joe Skorupa, Mark Fabbi, and Bjarne Munch, and published in April 2013.
Riverbed was the only vendor in the Leaders Quadrant in the most recent report and has been named to the Leaders Quadrant for the sixth consecutive time. According to Gartner, this report positions vendors in one of four quadrants – Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players – based on the companies’ vision and ability to execute on that vision. The entire report can be viewed here.
According to the report, “Current innovation is on form factors and platforms with WAN optimisation migrating toward powerful branch office platforms or to an optimised WAN cloud.” Further, “Leaders exhibit an ability to shape the market by introducing additional capabilities in their product offerings and by raising awareness of the importance of these features. We expect a Leader to grow the market as a whole and to have solutions that resonate with an increasing number of enterprises. Leaders in the WOC market must have a broad feature set, including QoS, generic compression, protocol acceleration and file system acceleration, with the majority of features proved in substantial real-world implementations. They also need to be able to offer sales and support on a global basis.”
“The rate and pace of change in enterprise IT has grown exponentially over the last few years,” said Taj Elkhayat, General Manager, Middle East and North Africa region at Riverbed. “New IT architectures and shifts in business structure such as cloud computing, virtualisation, software defined data centres, mobility and the consumerisation of IT create opportunities for the business and new challenges for the CIO. Many of our customers are finding that WAN optimisation is at the heart of enabling these new approaches without sacrificing performance. With our breadth and depth of optimisations and form factors, our customers rely on Riverbed as a strategic partner for ensuring application performance.”
Hyperconvergence requires organisations to rethink network with performance in mind
The urgent and disruptive trends that IT face today are what many thought leaders are calling hyperconvergence. Cloud, mobility, SaaS, collaboration and other trends are simultaneously placing new demands on organisations, forcing them to rethink the way they approach network design, architecture and sourcing. As IT organisations plan technology deployments, it is critical to understand the impact hyperconvergence will have on performance of applications over the wide area network (WAN). This trend is indicative of growing demand for WAN optimisation solutions.
2012 enhancements that increased application performance for global organisations
Riverbed continues to deliver application performance solutions to meet the ever-changing needs of global organisations, regardless of where an employee or data is located. The family of Riverbed WAN optimisation solutions come in a variety of form factors, including, physical, cloud edition, virtual edition and mobile, to enable organisations to deliver unmatched performance for large-scale data centre-to-data centre replication, “local” performance for remote and mobile workers, and acceleration for consolidated, cloud and virtualised environments. To meet customer demands Riverbed introduced new and enhanced products to address the growing demands of the global enterprise:
- The Steelhead CX 5055 model appliance and the Steelhead CX 7055 model appliance enable enterprises to more cost-effectively manage large-scale data centre-to-data centre replication and build large private cloud infrastructures.
- Steelhead integration with Riverbed Granite® enables organisations to create a powerful branch office platform that enables greater consolidation of branch infrastructure to the secure data centre. This integration enables complete edge server and storage consolidation in the data centre possible for the first time while still ensuring an accelerated and reliable end-user experience, even in the case of a WAN outage. Organisations are able to increase control over their entire IT infrastructure and reduce operational burdens, and create new possibilities for IT, including instant provisioning of branch offices from the data centre and instant restore should disaster occur. This approach improves security, data protection, and performance, all while reducing the total cost of ownership of branch infrastructure.
- The integration of VMware vSphere® into the Steelhead® EX model appliances provides organisations with a single platform for simplified, centralised management of distributed virtual services. When combined with award-winning Granite storage delivery solutions, organisations can consolidate edge data to the secure data centre, while delivering local performance access to branch employees.
- The Riverbed Optimisation System (RiOS) 8.0, the software that powers Steelhead appliances, enables organisations to prioritise more than 600 applications based on the business needs, and also includes QoS for PCoIP traffic.
- Steelhead Mobile 4.0 simplifies the management and provisioning of mobile users and devices and can now support up to 120,000 concurrent mobile users. Steelhead Mobile 4.0 also offers end-to-end Kerberos authentication support used by Microsoft applications and platforms including Active Directory and Windows Server, native optimisation for SMBv2 traffic, and full-spectrum optimisation for Outlook Anywhere.
- Riverbed partnered with Juniper Networks to deliver best-in-class WAN optimisation solutions, including plans to integrate Steelhead Mobile technology into the Juniper Networks Junos Pulse client to provide a mobile acceleration solution for mobile phones and tablets.
- Cloud Steelhead extends Riverbed WAN optimisation to a solution purpose-built for cloud computing environments by including cloud-intelligent features like transparent interception and a portal-based management system. When combined with the elasticity and subscription pricing model of AWS, organisations can easily install and scale within Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environments.
