San Francisco, CA — August 28, 2006 — Riverbed Technology, Inc., today announced new solutions that deliver industry-leading performance and scalability for wide-area data services (WDS) for the worlds' largest distributed organizations. The launch includes the next generation of the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS™), version 3.0, and three new Steelhead® appliances that deliver high scalability and acceleration for up to one million simultaneous connections at 4 Gbps throughput, even for real-time applications like voice. With these new solutions, Riverbed® widens its performance lead with the most scalable solution on the market; optimizes performance across all traffic types, including voice and video; and further simplifies network integration, management, and reporting.

“Riverbed’s release of its new models and RiOS 3.0 gives us a solution that meets our needs for both scale and performance,” said Norm Fjeldheim, chief information officer at QUALCOMM. “Our global network will benefit from the scale provided by Riverbed’s new Steelhead model 5520. The new NFS-specific optimizations, combined with the enhanced CIFS optimizations, should provide us with additional performance that will further improve collaboration and worker productivity.”

Riverbed customers–ranging from regional organizations with two offices to global enterprises with thousands of branch offices and hundreds of thousands of employees–can all benefit from the greater functionality and higher performance delivered by RiOS 3.0.  Optimizations in RiOS 3.0 include Network File System (NFS) application streamlining, which accelerates NFS for Linux/Unix users without the need for caching or explicit proxies. The performance of Unix-based applications such as ClearCase, Unigraphics, Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application (CATIA), and remote Home Directory access can increase by up to 55 times. RiOS 3.0 also includes new optimizations for the Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol that improve the performance of collaborative applications such as Visio and SolidWorks by up to 20 times. 

“We began testing the RiOS beta code two months ago,” said Michael Cesarz, manager of information technology at Mitsubishi Motors Research and Development of America, Inc. “The NFS optimizations provided by the Steelhead appliances have allowed us to move forward with our planned IT centralization. The performance improvements have reduced network traffic by 80 percent, while remote users are getting LAN-like speed over the WAN.”

RiOS 3.0 also supports QoS enforcement for all traffic types, including TCP, VoIP, video, and any other forms of UDP. Support for QoS allows organizations to more closely manage their real-time applications, including voice and video traffic. Riverbed’s QoS enforcement allows administrators to set policies based on both latency and bandwidth; in this way, they can prioritize latency-sensitive traffic such as voice and video without the expense of over-allocated bandwidth.

“Our company relies on VoIP for all voice calls,” said Chris Routhe, IT support analyst at Millard Lumber. “Before installing the 3.0 version of RiOS, users often experienced poor voice quality over our very highly congested links. With the new QoS features provided in RiOS 3.0, we now get line-quality service over our VoIP network. Our Mean Opinion Score jumped from 1.4 to 4.3.”

Extending the scalability of its Steelhead family, Riverbed introduced three new appliances for the large office or data center: 

• The Steelhead 5520 delivers optimized WAN bandwidth of up to OC-3 (155 Mbps) and 800 Mbps with disk-based data reduction disabled. It supports up to 15,000 simultaneous TCP connections and has a disk capacity of 1.5 TB and a data store of 700 GB
• The Steelhead 6020 is the most scalable WAN optimization product on the market. It delivers up to 310 Mbps and 800 Mbps with disk-based data reduction disabled. The Steelhead 6020 can support up to 40,000 simultaneous TCP connections and has a disk capacity of 3.2 TB and a data store of 1.4 TB.
• The Riverbed Interceptor 9200 is 28 times more scalable than any competitive product.  It allows very large organizations to deliver massive scalability by enabling virtual in-path clusters of Steelhead appliances without Web Cache Communications Protocol (WCCP) or Policy-Based Routing (PBR). The device supports up to a million simultaneous TCP connections per cluster and up to 4 Gbps of optimized WAN throughput. With the Interceptor, WAN administrators can configure, upgrade, and scale clustered Steelhead appliances non-obtrusively.

Every Steelhead introduced into the network can auto-detect over 4,000 other Steelhead peers without requiring complex tunneling configurations.

“Global enterprises require acceleration solutions that deliver performance, scale, and simplicity,” said Joe Skorupa, research vice president, enterprise network infrastructure, at Gartner. “Vendors that deliver market-leading performance and scale to hundreds of thousands of users and thousands of remote sites in a system that integrates simply and easily into complex network infrastructures will be very appealing to these customers.”

With RiOS 3.0, Riverbed extends its lead in simplifying network integration and implementation to ensure that even organizations with the most complex networks can install a best-of-breed acceleration solution quickly and easily. Integrated pre-population allows administrators to pre-populate content to remote servers using CIFS, with no agent required on the origin or destination servers. RiOS 3.0 sends only the bytes of data that have changed and allows the administrator to schedule pre-population events.

For extended cross-platform integration, Riverbed’s optional Proxy File Services (PFS) now works with Windows and non-Windows origin servers, with no agent required. PFS enables access to shares when the WAN is disconnected during network downtime due to technical failure or disaster.  Riverbed has also enhanced PFS with greater connection counts and easier management. In addition, RiOS 3.0 provides greater support for asymmetric routing by enabling client-side connection forwarding. Now enterprises can use the Steelhead appliance with asymmetric routing on both the server and client side of the network. This feature is critical for large, complex networks to ensure that traffic is optimized.

“With this new release of our product, Riverbed brings the market industrial-strength WAN acceleration technology that is suitable for even the largest of enterprise, government, and telecom organizations worldwide,” said Eric Wolford, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Riverbed.  “Our highly focused efforts in this space provide the best-of-breed products for global customers and show our long-term commitment and investment to remain the performance leader.”

Riverbed has made enhancements to the Central Management Console (CMC) and to Steelhead appliance transparency, enabling network managers to better manage and troubleshoot their networks. End-to-end transparency improvements include support for NetFlow Collector, which allows real-time export of traffic data to a third-party NetFlow device and gives administrators greater visibility into WAN traffic. In addition, the Steelhead appliances can now automatically map ports to applications, providing more visibility into the performance of applications across the WAN.

Enhanced central management and reporting features include reporting on performance by QoS class and detailed reporting on optimized and unoptimized traffic, global trending, global traffic breakdown, and performance report emailing. CMC 3.0 eases management further by providing a QoS rules facility, Steelhead appliance image hosting, and network link health analysis.

“We have long been happy Steelhead appliance users,” said Ray Sirois, director of IT at Wright-Pierce. “Making our applications fast over the WAN was our first priority, and Riverbed delivered from day one. With RiOS 3.0 and its enhancements to reporting, and the addition of NetFlow monitoring, we now have access to important information that allows us to isolate and troubleshoot network issues quickly and efficiently.”

“By expanding its family of Steelhead appliances, Riverbed can address a very wide range of enterprise customers and can optimize virtually any WAN application,” said Zeus Keravalla, vice president at the Yankee Group.  “Pharmaceutical, energy, financial services, aeronautics, and large-scale manufacturing companies are just a few of the globally distributed industries that need optimization for hundreds or even thousands of distributed offices.” 

All products mentioned in this announcement will be generally available on August 30, 2006. Steelhead appliance entry-level U.S. list pricing begins at $3,495. CMC 3.0 pricing starts at $5,000. The Interceptor 9200 U.S. list price is $49,995.

Riverbed Technology is the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS) solutions. By enabling application performance over the wide area network (WAN) that is orders of magnitude faster than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work, and enabling a distributed workforce that can collaborate as if they were local. Riverbed’s Steelhead appliance has been named InfoWorld’s "Technology of the Year" in both 2005 and 2006 as the "Best WAN Accelerator". In addition, Riverbed was named the winner of The Wall Street Journal’s 2005 Technology Innovation Award in the Network/Broadband/Internet category, Network Computing’s 2006 Well-Connected Award for Remote Office Network Infrastructure, and eWeek’s 2006 Excellence Award for Networking Infrastructure. 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. For more information, visit www.riverbed.com.

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Media Contact:

Riverbed Technology, Inc.
Kim Kapustka
(415) 344 4476
kim@riverbed.com

 

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