Riverbed Extends Performance Leadership: First to Accelerate SSL Traffic without Breaking Existing Trust Model
New RiOS 4.0 Accelerates SSL, Streamlines Critical Web-based Business Applications, and Simplifies WDS Deployment
San Francisco, CA — March 5, 2007 — Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: RVBD), the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS), announced today the fourth generation of its award-winning Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS™). Based on data and broad experience from more than 1,600 customers, RiOS 4.0 enhancements address customers’ real-world business challenges. With RiOS 4.0, enterprises can now apply Riverbed’s industry-leading optimizations to SSL traffic for end-to-end secure traffic acceleration, effectively accelerate critical Web-based business applications, and simplify the deployment and management of Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances in large, complex and mission-critical environments. To learn more about RiOS 4.0, visit www.riverbed.com/technology/whats_new.
“Our new Branch Office Optimization report www.riverbed.com/pr/esg surveyed more than 600 IT professionals and confirmed that remote office security continues to be a top priority for enterprises, and they are rapidly adopting SSL to protect corporate data in an increasingly distributed global business climate,” said Jon Oltsik, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “SSL application deployment in organizations has increased by 50 to 55 percent, and SSL represents anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of enterprise traffic. Until now, SSL security and WAN performance were constantly in conflict. RiOS 4.0 is the first solution to rectify that problem for distributed enterprises."
RiOS 4.0 Accelerates SSL While Maintaining the Preferred Trust Model
Until now, enterprises were forced to trade security for performance because SSL-encrypted traffic normally defeats application acceleration techniques. Current approaches require enterprises either to turn off SSL to achieve acceleration, or destroy the trust model by requiring SSL certificates and private keys to be copied and moved outside of the data center onto remote servers, a process
commonly referred to as certificate faking or certificate spoofing. Alternatives such as SSL offload accelerate traffic moving over the Internet by offloading CPU cycles from a web server so that it can handle more requests but have minimal impact on TCP, data, or application optimizations.
Riverbed® can now accelerate SSL across the WAN without compromising the security trust model, and eliminates distributed key management problems. Riverbed adds SSL acceleration to its existing support for site-to-site VPNs and its site-to-site IPSEC option, offering an advanced, comprehensive set of secure application acceleration capabilities.
“Riverbed continues to raise the bar and extend its technology leadership in the WDS market by understanding customers’ key pain points,” said Zeus Kerravala, vice president, Yankee Group. “Enterprises increasingly rely on web-based applications as an integral part of their core business operations. Now that Riverbed has delivered SSL and HTTPS traffic acceleration with its 4.0 release, companies can satisfy their security requirements without having to sacrifice performance.”
Learning Mechanism Enhances Mission-Critical Web-Based Applications
Riverbed has also added enhancements for Web-based business applications that are now a critical component of day-to-day business operations for its global customer base. Most SSL traffic on the network is HTTPS. RiOS 4.0 further accelerates HTTP and now can accelerate HTTPS, the underlying protocols that support web-based business applications such as SAP, Siebel, Peoplesoft, IBM Websphere
and MS Sharepoint, among others.
RiOS 4.0 also contains enhancements to its intelligent learning mechanism that discovers and tracks objects on Web pages, such as images, scripts and cascading style sheets. Once the server-side Steelhead appliance has knowledge of the objects on a page, it can streamline page requests by transferring all the objects in parallel, confining chattiness to the LAN and optimizing the WAN data transfer. The Steelhead appliance on the client side then reconstructs that page and delivers it to the client. Even with ongoing, dynamic web changes, Steelhead appliances continue to learn and store objects over time and have the tools and mechanisms in place to accelerate them.
Maximum Speed TCP, Simplified Deployments, and High Availability
RiOS 4.0 also improves Riverbed’s existing high-speed TCP optimizations with MX-TCP or Max-Speed TCP. TCP is a “good neighbor” protocol that ramps up or backs down transmissions depending on congestion or packet loss in the network. This congestion-control property of TCP prevents full utilization of available WAN bandwidth, even on very large WAN connections.
MX-TCP uses the Quality of Service (QoS) enforcement capabilities of RiOS 4.0 to alter and control the sending rate of traffic to ensure 100 percent utilization of the allowable bandwidth dedicated by an administrator. MX-TCP can optimize any site-to-site transfer or replication. It is designed to work over high bandwidth, high latency connections (also known as long fat networks), or over any connection that might experience heavy packet loss such as a satellite connection.
“We do most of our QoS configuration in our Cisco routers, separating out VoIP from data for example,” said Ray Sirois, IT manager at Wright Pierce. “However, within the data sector, we are finding that we can configure more granularity in our QoS much more easily using the QoS features of our RiOS 4.0 Steelhead appliances. Our users notice the difference. Riverbed makes QoS live up to its namesake: truly better quality of service.”
Additional RiOS 4.0 features include enhanced auto discovery to improve performance and simplify deployments for large, complex environments. Enhanced auto discovery automatically finds and optimizes WAN traffic between the most distant Steelhead pair endpoints, eliminating the need for manual peering in multi-hop environments and requiring no additional configuration.
Active-active sync enhancements allow customers that cannot afford to lose optimization performance to create high-availability, hot-failover environments that assure consistent performance at all times. With this feature, two Steelhead appliances constantly synchronize data and simultaneously optimize connections to guarantee performance for business-critical applications, even in the unlikely event of a Steelhead failure.
Availability
RiOS 4.0 will be generally available in March 2007 at no additional cost to licensees with a current maintenance and support contract, subject to US export controls. Riverbed is also announcing a software license upgrade on its 1U 520 and 1020 models. Using a software license key, customers can grow from 300 to 1,000 optimized TCP connections for additional bandwidth or throughput on the
same device without forklift upgrades.
About Riverbed’s Steelhead Appliances
Riverbed’s WDS solutions enable organizations with more than one office to overcome a host of severe problems, including poor application performance and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. By speeding the performance of applications between distributed sites by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times between enterprise datacenters and remote offices, Riverbed’s award-winning
Steelhead WDS appliances enable companies to consolidate IT, improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, and improve staff productivity and collaboration. Steelhead appliances have been deployed in organizations ranging from the world’s largest corporations with offices around the globe to small companies with a couple of sites that are just miles apart. To learn more,
view Riverbed’s demo: www.riverbed.com/pr/jack.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions for companies worldwide. By enabling application performance over the wide area network (WAN) that is orders of magnitude faster than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work, and enabling a distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local. Additional information about Riverbed (Nasdaq: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.
Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for Riverbed’s products and services, and statements relating to Riverbed’s ability to meet the needs of distributed organizations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed’s business are set forth in our Form 10-K filed with the SEC on February 9, 2007. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements.
Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead, RiOS, Interceptor, and the Riverbed logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
Media Contacts:
Kim Kapustka
415-344-4476
kim@riverbed.com
Megan Atiyeh
Engage PR
(510) 748-8200 x228
matiyeh@engagepr.com
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