WAN Optimization

"There are three major technologies that have changed the way we do business: email, the web, and WAN optimization from Riverbed."
—Bruce Bartolf, CTO, Gensler Architecture Worldwide

Since their WAN is fundamental to so much of our customer’s business, WAN optimization can deliver massive improvements to a wide range of their top IT initiatives:

• Accelerate application performance up to 50X, increasing business productivity.
• Consolidate in the branch and datacenter, and see a 6-month payback.
• Optimize file sharing, web, email and even voice video – all at the same time.
• Leverage cloud economics without compromise.
• Protect data more completely, with less cost and effort.
• Solve problems up to 83% faster.

Riverbed leads the WAN optimization space, with the most innovation around the most comprehensive offerings, and the most performance for the most applications. Oh, and the most happy customers, too.

The Riverbed WAN optimization solution can change the way your business works by improving and accelerating application performance across the WAN. Using WAN optimization, IT can provide LAN-like access to data and applications throughout the enterprise — anytime, anywhere. It’s the only solution to span mobile workers, branch offices, and data centers, allowing your distributed workforce to collaborate in real time. And it does all this while streamlining operations, improving visibility, and reducing the costs of IT infrastructure.

Boost Productivity & Improve Business Processes

Speed up applications, raise productivity, and eliminate the impact of distance between branch offices, mobile workers, the data center, and business headquarters.

• Improve the performance of many of the most commonly used applications across the network, typically by 5-50 times and, in some cases, by up to 100 times.
• Accelerate operations by reducing the time required to complete repetitive operations.
• Ensure fast, reliable access to data and applications for employees around the globe. Achieve LAN-like performance for mobile employees, no matter where they are. Promote real-time collaboration, enable distributed collaboration and outsourcing, and streamline communications.
• Enhance “follow-the-sun” operational models — quickly transfer data and complete transactions, even in remote locations.
• Tightly integrate resource planning (ERP) systems and product lifecycle (PLM) platforms with distributed employees — including mobile workers — while opening these systems and platforms to suppliers and partners. Take full advantage of systems you’ve already purchased or have in place but haven’t able to use because of performance issues.
• Tap global markets for less by harnessing the power of your people and infrastructure as if they were all in one location.

Save Money & Achieve Measurable ROI

Deliver strategic value while helping your IT team cut unnecessary costs out of your operations.

• Reduce the use of WAN bandwidth by 65-95 percent, and relieve network congestion.
• Cut server costs and routine IT maintenance. Consolidate servers into data centers more effectively and enable virtualization, without impacting performance.
• Push out costly network upgrades by two years or more, according to several analyst firms. Accommodate more growth and more users without investing in additional networking infrastructure.

Accomplish Key Business Initiatives

Take advantage of dramatic gains in IT performance to enable real change. Use powerful performance analysis tools to get to the heart of a problem quickly. Use these tools to adapt your IT strategy to your business strategy.

• Consolidation and Virtualization — Centralize your IT infrastructure to lower costs, simplify management, improve security, and ease regulatory compliance, without clogging networks, sacrificing performance, or frustrating users. Accomplish all this through transparent integration with your current application, network, and storage technology.
• Collaboration — Allow your workers across the globe to share applications, documents, email, design files, and software as if they were all operating from the same location. Improve time to market, enable follow-the-sun development models, enhance workload balancing, and gain flexibility for your business.
• Cloud Acceleration — Go beyond just accelerating your data centers to accelerate public and private cloud implementations as well. Leverage the latest cost-cutting technology while delivering higher-performing applications to your users.
• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery — Cut RPO by 90 percent and radically reduce RTO by optimizing backup across the current WAN and VPN. Protect servers, SANs, NAS, and even end-user machines. Recover data on virtual machines up to 50 times faster. Make sure workers can continue to operate at full capacity in the event of major or minor disruptions.
• Visibility — Proactively optimize and control the performance of applications, servers, and the network, all from a single web interface. Gain insight into potential problem areas and better understand where IT limitations are actually causing business limitations.
• Agility — Respond to changing business needs quickly, without ballooning your budget. Make your IT infrastructure much more nimble. Locate data centers anywhere — and move them in a fraction of the time. Roll out applications and upgrades quickly and efficiently.

"By reducing the amount of data traversing the WAN, the savings in bandwidth costs alone paid for our investment in Riverbed."
—Steve Schmitt, IT Manager, Le Coq Sportif

In today’s business technology environment, there’s more — more data in more places, more distance between worker and office, more regulations, and more demands on IT. But at the same time, there’s less — less time and less money for IT resources and infrastructure.

The Riverbed WAN optimization solution gives you the tools you need to meet these challenges. With Riverbed, you can accelerate your network, optimize your infrastructure, and simplify management, while scaling to meet the needs of even the most complex IT environment.

How can Riverbed help you do more with less?

Enhance Performance

Realize dramatic performance improvements across the broad range of applications enterprises care about most.

• Accelerate application performance, typically by 5-50 times and, in some cases, by up to 100 times. Get more out of the applications your business relies on every day, including file sharing, email, backup, SSL, document management systems, IT tools, SharePoint, SAP, and ERP and CRM solutions.
• Ensure fast, reliable access to data and applications for employees around the globe. Achieve LAN-like performance for mobile employees, no matter where they are. Drive faster performance to primary and secondary data centers for DR processes.
• Meet the ongoing challenges of enterprise application performance. Enhance visibility into all key applications that cross the WAN. Quickly identify and resolve problems, eliminate pain points, validate that problems were resolved successfully, create global controls, and optimize applications for future business needs.
• Address application- and TCP-level protocol chattiness to eliminate inefficient behavior and drastically reduce redundant roundtrips.

Optimize WAN Bandwidth & Avoid Costly Upgrades

Reduce network traffic, relieve network congestion, and lower costs.

• Cut bandwidth utilization, typically by 60-95 percent, using data deduplication across all TCP-based applications. Data is analyzed at the byte level, ensuring that the maximum amount of redundant data is eliminated before it crosses the network.
• Free up bandwidth for other applications, like VoIP or Citrix, so they can perform better.
• Minimize the need for expensive WAN upgrades — in an office served by a T1 (1.5 Mbps), you can deliver bandwidth equivalent of up to between 3-30 Mbps just by adding Steelhead appliances to your WAN link.

Streamline IT Operations & Infrastructure

Optimize your existing environment, reduce IT overhead, and align IT investments with the business.

• Use the infrastructure you already have more efficiently, and cut the use of bandwidth, routers, and switches.
• Deploy in a matter of minutes by following a virtually plug-and-play process.
• Configure, update, and monitor performance through a single web-based interface, the Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC)
• Easily scale to hundreds or thousands of branch offices and mobile workers.
• Integrate with Cisco and other networks, alongside VoIP, video conferencing, and QoS.
• Enhance visibility into your infrastructure and analyze how IT resources are being used. 
• Use this knowledge to accelerate key applications, fine-tune systems, and allocate resources to best meet enterprise needs.

Visibility and analytics go well beyond simple reporting that confirms whether the infrastructure is up and running. True optimization-oriented visibility breaks down data into a deeper understanding of how applications are performing, analytics that set alerts when anomalous performance is detected, and details on which sites can benefit most from further optimization. This type of visibility can impact many different initiatives, including:

• Implementing and managing service level agreements (SLAs)
• Accelerating troubleshooting and mean time to respond (MTTR) to incidents
• Determining the impact of application acceleration and WAN optimization
• Analyzing future IT investments in relation to business priorities

Consolidate IT Infrastructure Without Sacrificing Performance

Lower costs, improve security, and ease regulatory compliance.

• Consolidate multiple global and regional data centers — no need to constantly build, maintain, monitor, patch, upgrade, and mirror numerous data centers to achieve acceptable application performance. Improve data consistency and performance. Roll out new applications and upgrades quickly and efficiently. Achieve and prove compliance more easily.
• Consolidate file servers, email servers, SAN and NAS devices, and remote tape backup libraries by addressing bandwidth, TCP behavior, and latency. Eliminate underutilized, hard-to-manage servers in remote locations. Reduce capital expenditures and improve maintenance cycles.
• Consolidate at the edge while still delivering essential local services, like print, DNS, and DHCP, to all your branch offices. Use the serverless branch office model to simplify management, lower costs, use resources more efficiently, and protect data more effectively.
• Consolidate backup data into the data center, where it’s more accessible and secure. Lower backup and service costs, simplify off-site media management and storage, reduce time spent on manual backup processes, and speed data recovery. Ensure business continuity if data is lost from the primary location.