Application Acceleration
Many enterprises believe that the key to application
acceleration is WAN optimization. But optimizing the network - via
compression, QoS, or TCP optimization - is only one part of the
solution needed to truly improve application performance across the
network. Unlike other approaches to application acceleration,
Riverbed's wide-area data services (WDS) solutions can provide
dramatic application performance increases - typically by five to
50 times and in some cases up to 100 times faster - across the
broad range of applications that enterprises care about the
most
WAN Bandwidth Optimization
Many enterprises use WAN bandwidth optimization in order to cut
costs and relieve network congestion. But typical WAN optimization
products only reduce network traffic by ten or twenty percent. In
contrast, a wide-area data services (WDS) solution can reduce
network utilization typically by 60 to 95%.
IT Consolidation
Application performance optimization is an important component
of consolidation because users are required to perform many more
transactions over the wide area network than before. In a
consolidated environment, data requests such as those for files or
emails that were previously served by local infrastructure must now
take place over the WAN. Without a wide-area data services solution
in place to accelerate applications, these requests could result in
congested networks, poor application performance, and frustrated
users.
Optimize Disaster Recovery
With the growing importance of disaster recovery, enterprises
are relying more heavily on WAN-based backup and data replication
to secure important files and data. Backup and replication over the
WAN ensures that data can be safely protected at a distance to the
primary site, but also introduces new performance challenges that
require enterprises to seek out methods that accelerate WAN backup
applications.
Riverbed Steelhead Appliances
Accelerate Mobile Workers
With a mobile wide-area data services (WDS) solution like
Steelhead Mobile, mobile workers can now have the same LAN-like
access to applications and data that employees in the office have.
These solutions use software running on the end-users' machine to
connect with an appliance in the data center.
Virtualization
Imagine using virtualization to consolidate 50 physical servers
in branches down to 5 in a data center with no performance hit for
your end-users. With Riverbed, this is a reality that customers
already experience today. Riverbed Steelhead products can
accelerate application access and data transfer times by up to
100x. Multiple customers have consolidated servers and sites using
Riverbed and VMware together without their end-users ever knowing
applications and data have been moved hundreds of miles away.2
