Riverbed launches cloud computing acceleration

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Riverbed Technologies has brought its acceleration technology to the cloud with two new products.

First up is the Riverbed Cloud Steelhead, an extension of the company’s already well-established Steelhead technology and the first wide area network (WAN) optimisation solution designed specifically for public clouds.

During a press event in London yesterday evening, Riverbed showed how the product vastly improves the speed of accessing cloud-based applications and the simplicity of Steelhead integration.

Riverbed vice president of product marketing Apurva Dave was particularly excited about the Steelhead Discovery Agent included in the new offering.

With this feature, servers authorised to use WAN optimisation will automatically redirect connections to the appropriate Cloud Steelhead. When a request comes in from a user, the Discovery Agent can tell on the far side of the connection if another Steelhead exists and then optimise the connection between the two end points.

“This is a pretty powerful feature … that no other vendor can match,” Dave said.

Cloud Steelhead v1.0 will be available in the fourth quarter and will initially integrate with Amazon EC2 and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Businesses can enjoy the product’s benefits with a monthly fee starting at $250 (£155) per month.

Riverbed’s second announcement was the launch of a new line of products aimed at accelerating cloud storage.

The Riverbed Whitewater appliances address current latency and security concerns in the multi-billion dollar cloud storage market.

Again Riverbed showcased the vastly superior speed of downloads from the cloud, comparing non-optimised and optimised services.

“It will make it feel as if your backups are local,” Dave claimed.

As for security, data transferred to and from the cloud is protected with 256-bit AES and SSL v3 encryption.

Riverbed has also extended its deduplication expertise to the cloud with Whitewater, thereby cutting the cost of storage used and bandwidth requirements needed for shifting data.

Whitewater will come in three different forms, one virtual appliance and two physical, and will be available in the fourth quarter with prices starting at $12,000.

Read on for our look at whether cloud computing can really help cut costs.

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