Spotlight

Addressing remote office needs

Riverbed Technology has been involved in developing a solution for latency and bandwidth optimization that form the key concerns of remote offices, writes V Sudhakshina

Jerry M Kennelly and Dr Steve McCanne started Riverbed Technology in May 2002. Based out of San Francisco, the company had a vision to create an integrated and intelligent solution for networking, application, and storage issues that together slow the performance of distributed networks and cause remote sites to suffer painfully slow application and file transfer speeds.

The founders were of the opinion that slow performance over WAN links is one of the root causes of the high cost of IT in distributed enterprises. Although there were companies providing cache-based solutions, no organization was able to address the latency issue in a major way. Latency optimization was a major concern, especially for remotely located office networks.

Thus, they aimed in improving the throughput over those WAN links, which will enable significant cost reductions and productivity improvements for most large enterprises. They thought of launching one such intelligent product that will not only solve the latency-based issues but also be a solution to the entire infrastructure management. Since 2002, for one-and-a-half years the company spent a lot of time on research and product development. They began the first customer shipment of their product Steelhead Appliances by May 2004.

Riverbed in India

India is a key market for Riverbed for gaining their position as market leaders in the WDS (Wide-area Data Service) segment. Riverbed has over 200 customers in India and believes in going through their channel partners here. The channel partners include names like Quadsel, Datacraft, Wipro, BT Infosys, Kalyani Informatics and Locuz.

The company believes in having less of direct headcounts, giving more advantage to channel partners, and leverage support through their assistance centers worldwide so that customers here get the same level of support as clients from other parts of the world.

In India, they are into sales and product consultation for their customers. “Our workforce in India is enabling customers to try and drive a solution and understand their needs. We are actually more of consultants and give support to our customers worldwide. We do not need hundreds of people for support and operate indirectly through our channel partners,” said Vivek Singh, Regional Director, Riverbed.

Product categories

Steelhead Appliances is Riverbed’s WDS product that gives LAN like performance over WAN. It radically improves the performance of most client-server applications when used on WAN.

The applications are optimized using a range of techniques. All applications used over WAN can be accelerated through Microsoft Exchange, Unix file sharing, Windows file sharing, document management systems, Microsoft SharePoint, MS-SQL applications, Lotus Notes, Web-based Apps, FTP, most backup and replication software, and many others.

Steelhead Appliances defeat many of the effects of limited bandwidth and high latency without introducing a new file system or protocol.

The Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) software platform, which is based on patented technologies, addresses four main solution areas. Application acceleration that accelerates all TCP traffic—mail, file transfers, FTP, Web, Notes, Dbase, ERP, backup applications, and other key enterprise applications—delivering LAN-like performance that dramatically improves collaboration, file sharing and productivity for distributed enterprises.

WAN bandwidth optimization eliminates all redundant WAN traffic, effectively expanding bandwidth by a factor of 10 or more. IT infrastructure consolidation enables network architects to consolidate file servers, email servers, NAS and tape libraries from remote offices to data centers—without degrading end-user performance.

Stated Singh, “We are basically a software company and our intellectual property is RiOS. From day one, our focus was in the latency optimization and our products are designed to respond to the concerns expressed by IT managers. Our product line has been laid down for connecting different offices, in helping them to accelerate all the information and address the latency issue by reducing application response time.”

Roadmap for the future

Riverbed wants to enhance its products by adding more features and applications. They want to continue bringing leading technologies to the market and increasing their footprint. India is a key market for Riverbed as organizations continue to grow and set up offices in various locations.

They are planning to invest in training their partners on their sales and business perspectives and educating the market on WDS and its real benefit, creating awareness amongst enterprises and conducting live proof of concept across customer networks to show real quantifiable benefits.