San Francisco — March 8, 2006 — Riverbed Technology, Inc., the performance leader in application acceleration on wide area networks (WANs), announced today hardware upgrades to its line of Steelhead® appliances with the introduction of three new models: the 520, 1020 and 2020. The new Steelhead appliance models are designed to deliver more robust platforms for small-to-mid-sized remote offices at organizations of all sizes. The new models provide customers with increased performance and scale over the existing Steelhead appliance models 510, 1010 and 2010 which they replace. With the new xx20 series, Riverbed® is building on its Steelhead appliance product family to continue to provide the highest level of optimization for the broadest range of applications, and allow customers to accelerate application performance, consolidate IT infrastructure and improve backup, replication and disaster recovery capabilities.

"At Riverbed we strive for continuous improvement of our product capabilities," said John Martin, vice president, product management at Riverbed. "As the wide-area data services (WDS) market matures, companies are relying more and more on the capabilities of our Steelhead appliances. IT consolidation projects are moving forward and mission-critical data is moving across the WAN. With these enhancements to the Steelhead product line, enterprise customers have access to increased product horsepower and increased optimization capabilities. And we've given our customers significant headroom to grow, by equalizing the WAN bandwidth capacity on our low-end platforms, while significantly increasing capacity on our mid-tier solutions."

The announcement of the xx20 series follows Riverbed's recent release of the Steelhead appliance models 100 and 200. With the addition of the xx20 series, Riverbed's Steelhead appliance product family continues to provide customers with the solutions that best fit their needs, while delivering a robust platform that will grow with the organization. From small offices with fewer than five employees, up to large sites with thousands of users, the Steelhead appliances ensure the highest level of optimization for all applications that traverse the WAN.

"We evaluated thoroughly the alternatives available in the WDS space and selected Riverbed over the competition because the Steelhead appliances deliver the highest performance for all of our critical applications," said Gordon Layton at Jordan, Jones & Goulding. "When we learned of the new xx20 models, we moved forward quickly to purchase because of the even greater levels of scale and value provided by these models."

Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead appliances are a new generation of IT infrastructure products from Riverbed that accelerate enterprise applications by up to 100 times between enterprise datacenters and remote offices. The Steelhead appliance's intelligent optimizations give companies that share data and collaborate between distributed offices the best performance for the widest range of applications, completely changing the way distributed IT is designed, deployed, used and managed.

Unlike competing approaches that are built primarily on either a network-compression or storage (caching) philosophy (like many WAFS-only architectures), Steelhead appliances are based on Riverbed's Universal Transport Acceleration (UTA) architecture that optimizes bandwidth for all TCP-based applications, including common applications like Windows file sharing, MAPI, Microsoft SQL and DPM, NetApp's SnapMirror, Symantec's NetBackup and FTP, while adding incremental application-specific latency optimizations to minimize the impact of latency on key applications.

Riverbed's intelligent optimizations also enable remote office IT consolidation, WAN bandwidth optimization and acceleration of data replication and backup.

The Steelhead appliance models 520, 1020 and 2020 are generally available now.

Riverbed Technology is the pioneer in wide-area data services (WDS), a fast-growing product category that solves the problems of high latency and low bandwidth that plague a wide variety of applications over distributed networks. Riverbed's Steelhead appliances provide the highest level of performance across the broadest range of applications over WANs, accelerating applications by up to 100 times, and reducing WAN traffic by up to 95%. By providing optimizations that are orders of magnitude greater than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work and enabling, for the first time, a distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local. The Wall Street Journal named Riverbed the winner of its 2005 Technology Innovation Award in the Network/Broadband/Internet category. In addition, InfoWorld has named Steelhead a "Technology of the Year" in both 2005 and 2006, as the "Best WAN Accelerator". Riverbed's award-winning solutions are available worldwide from resellers who are members of the Riverbed Partner Network, from Riverbed OEM partners, or directly from Riverbed. Riverbed has received funding from Accel Partners, Goldman Sachs, Lightspeed Venture Partners and UV Partners.

Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead 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.

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For more information, visit www.riverbed.com.

Media Contacts:

Alan Saldich
Riverbed Technology
(415) 247-7308
alan@riverbed.com

Kim Kapustka
K2pr
(650) 685-6342
kim@k2pr.com

 

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