Is WAN optimisation gaining popularity in the Middle East? What is driving the market?
The Middle East market as a whole is one of the fastest growing markets worldwide and the IT sector in particular has been growing at an impressive rate. Riverbed has been able to capitalise on this market situation; especially since several companies here have more than one office and many of these companies benefit from Riverbed’s solution. Businesses are now looking to consolidate their IT infrastructure to improve the performance of their application and to reduce cost of IT by doing more with less; this is where Riverbed can play a crucial part.
Do you support the users during the implementation process and offer full installation?
Our Riverbed Professional Services offering includes Riverbed Steelhead planning, deployment, configuration, testing, and operational knowledge transfer services from an experienced consultant. Leveraging Riverbed Best Practices, this service can enhance the adoption and utilization of the Riverbed Steelhead solution. In addition, with our large number of certified partners throughout the region, we are able to give immediate support to our customers wherever they are.
What should users look for while choosing WAN acceleration gear?
When choosing a Wan Acceleration appliance there are a number of points that should be considered and these are typically aligned to the business:
1.Simplicity – the product must be easy to manage and Install
2.Scalable – Anything new that goes into the network needs to be able to scale as the business expands, and this must be as transparent to the server and user.
3.ROI – Any new technology that is considered must have a demonstrable ROI – without a tangible cost benefit it will very difficult to justify any additional spend
4.Secure – As we move more towards HTTP(S) applications the product needs to be able to support this protocol and be able to accelerate key applications including CIFS
5.DR – the solution must be able to help with the business SLA for DR and include some kind of remote user platform, allowing the mobile user to have the same application performance when working from home as if they were in the office.
Do you support virtualisation technologies?
Moving to a virtualized infrastructure offers multiple benefits to organizations and offers far-reaching opportunities for IT managers to fundamentally transform the operations in their data centers. However the gains made from virtualization can be offset by application performance degradation that, in some cases, renders applications unusable over the wide area network (WAN).
Riverbed WAN optimization solutions enable LAN-like access to virtualized infrastructure for users regardless of location. It accelerates the performance of all TCP applications running over the WAN by addressing the three primary issues, namely bandwidth constraints, TCP latency and application chattiness.
The combination of Riverbed WAN optimization and virtualization together provide a unique architecture that is hardware platform independent and unconstrained by geographical limitations.
Can you tell us a bit more about the latest Mazu acquisition?
Mazu Networks provides a unique, powerful and flexible analysis and reporting software that presents a holistic, real-time view of application usage and performance. This perspective is critical to understanding the application environment and taking the right steps to validate and ensure delivery of business-critical applications across the wide area network (WAN).
As the market for WAN optimization becomes more mainstream, enterprise and service provider customers are demanding more visibility, reporting and analytics capabilities as they seek to deploy more robust infrastructure for managing their global applications. This requirement is driven by the enterprise’s need to reduce costs via consolidation, improve end-user productivity and leverage technology to streamline business processes.
The acquisition of Mazu Networks allows Riverbed to meet enterprise and service provider customer demands by extending its suite of WAN optimization products to include global application performance, reporting and analytics. This provides customers with a closed-loop system for managing enterprise-wide applications by intelligently monitoring and analyzing performance, demonstrating the need for return on investment (ROI) of optimization, and allowing users to continuously manage performance targets to predetermined objectives.
The Mazu product line supports Riverbed’s position by delivering speed in performance analysis, providing scale to Riverbed’s customers’ ability to monitor the optimization and performance of their key applications and allowing Riverbed to deliver simplicity in the analysis and reporting of that information across a customer’s entire environment with customizable dashboards and reports.
