San Francisco — July 18, 2005 — Riverbed Technology, the performance leader in application acceleration on wide area networks, today announced the 2.0 version of its award-winning Steelhead™ product family. With the release of Steelhead 2.0, Riverbed now offers distributed enterprises the most complete and best performing wide-area data services (WDS) solution available today. This release builds on Riverbed's groundbreaking technology, including significant advances in the areas of high-availability, performance, scalability and network integration, security and management. In addition, with this release Steelhead is the first and only WDS solution that provides application-level support for Microsoft SQL (MS SQL).

"We have a corporate initiative to centralize some IT resources and build a serverless office model at some or our remote sites. In addition, we are removing Microsoft Exchange servers at all remote sites," said Kevin Madsen, network analyst at Stanley Consultants, Inc. "Riverbed's Steelhead is a core component of this consolidation. Since deploying Steelhead at two of our sites, performance for file sharing is 80 times faster across the WAN. Now with 2.0, Riverbed has added features that make the serverless office even more appealing. At one site we've seen performance gains of approximately 60% for Exchange 2003, even in cache mode. Our members in remote offices can now efficiently transfer files within the office without experiencing performance delays caused by transferring files from the remote office to headquarters and back again. We've also seen phenomenal increases in MS SQL performance. Riverbed is helping us make our consolidation plans a reality."

Version 2.0 of Riverbed's software allows geographically dispersed enterprises to further capitalize on all the benefits of LAN-like performance over the WAN, without worrying about WAN failures. Steelhead appliances allow these organizations to address many critical problems, including poor application performance, insufficient bandwidth into remote sites, difficulties in site consolidation, and challenges with remote data backup and replication.

"The fact that Riverbed has acquired more than 200 customers in this short a period of time should tell everyone that this technology is for real," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. "You really can eliminate most of your remote IT problems today, but nobody believes it yet. It's time to wake up."

With version 2.0, Riverbed offers a complete WDS solution that addresses the challenges outlined above. Specific enhancements include:

Microsoft SQL Acceleration – Steelhead appliances now provide an additional application-level acceleration module that significantly improves the performance of applications using Microsoft SQL as the database back-end, such as Microsoft Project Enterprise. No other vendor provides as broad a range of application-level latency optimizations.

Proxy File Service (PFS) – Steelhead appliances now provide for disconnected operation with PFS - the capability to continue to serve files even in the event of a WAN outage. File shares and directories can be configured in several ways to deliver read/write access to some files, and read-only access to others. PFS delivers the highest possible performance to designated local file shares in remote offices, and provides for automatic replication of those files back to the data center for more reliable disaster recovery and faster restores of remote office servers.

High-Speed TCP – This new feature, available only on the Steelhead 5010, provides dramatic acceleration for applications like FTP over long fat networks (LFNs) where the WAN link is very large, but latency is high and throughput has been severely limited. Specifically, on WAN links such as OC-12 or Gigabit Ethernet, high-speed TCP on Steelhead appliances can deliver throughputs in the range of 500-620 Mbps, even on inter-continental links where round-trip latencies are well over several hundred milliseconds.

Other additions in Steelhead 2.0 include enhancements for large scale deployments, such as IPSEC encryption between appliances, improved 1:1 failover, optional 4-port GigE NIC cards (up to 12 Gigabit Ethernet ports in larger models; up to four in smaller models), and TCP connection forwarding, all of which simplify deployment in large, complex and sophisticated enterprise networks. In addition, Steelhead 2.0 has improved Exchange 2003 and CIFS performance and significantly enhanced management capabilities through the Central Management Console (CMC).

"Riverbed has reached the 200 customer mark with more than 1500 appliances deployed in less than 14 months of shipping product," said Eric Wolford, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Riverbed Technology. "In fact, we've doubled our customer base in only three months. As we've worked with our customers, we've listened and learned from their experiences in the field. We've observed that while geographically distributed companies face many common IT problems, there is also variability in their needs. Our new 2.0 release gives customers a great deal of flexibility. Optional features such as PFS, MS SQL support and our 4-port GigE card allow organizations to choose the configuration and capabilities that best fit their business model, while performance improvements, new security features and management capabilities benefit a broad range of Riverbed customers. The combination delivers without a doubt the most comprehensive WDS solution available today."

"Remote worker productivity is critical to our business," said Ron Maxwell, IT manager at Blakely, Johnson, Ghusn (BJG). "We are an architectural firm headquartered in Reno, with a serverless branch office in Las Vegas. BJG staff in the Las Vegas office access and download large AutoCAD files from our Reno office servers many times throughout the day. Since installing Riverbed's Steelhead appliance, download times have dropped dramatically. File transfers that once took hours, now take minutes, or even seconds. Steelhead has changed the rules of what it means to be remotely connected."

Riverbed offers customers a range of appliances, with pricing starting at $7,500. Steelhead 2.0 will be generally available on July 28.

Riverbed Technology is the pioneer in wide area data services (WDS), a fast-growing product category that solves the problems of high latency and limited bandwidth that plague a wide variety of applications over distributed networks. Riverbed's Steelhead appliances provide the highest level of WAN performance at a lower cost, reducing WAN traffic by up to 95% and accelerating applications by up to 100 times. By providing optimizations that are orders of magnitude greater than what users experience today, Riverbed is changing the way people work � and enabling, for the first time, a truly distributed workforce. InfoWorld named Steelhead a "Technology of the Year" for 2005 as the "Best WAN Accelerator." Riverbed's award-winning solutions are available worldwide on their Steelhead appliances directly from Riverbed and as products available through global OEM partners, including HP. Riverbed has received funding from Accel Partners, Goldman Sachs, Lightspeed Venture Partners and UV Partners.

Riverbed Technology, Riverbed, Steelhead and the Riverbed logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc.

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For more information, visit www.riverbed.com.

Media Contacts:

Alan Saldich
Riverbed Technology  
(415) 247-7308 
alan@riverbed.com

Kim Kapustka
K2pr
(650) 685-6342
kim@k2pr.com

 

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