Riverbed Technology Inc., an IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, announced on Tuesday the Riverbed Steelhead 7050 model wide area network (WAN) optimization appliance.
To deliver high performance, flexibility and fault tolerance in large data centers and private cloud environments, the Steelhead 7050 model appliance combines new levels of bandwidth and TCP session scalability with solid-state drives (SSD) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE). This new appliance efficiently scales to meet the performance, reliability and flexibility requirements of large enterprises and allows them to more cost-effectively manage large-scale data center-to-data center replication, accelerate applications among many locations and users in an enterprise, and build large private cloud infrastructures.
"With the introduction of the Steelhead 7050, Riverbed once again proves its vision and leadership of the WAN optimization market. Especially well designed for disaster recovery use cases, the new appliance positions Riverbed to dominate in the data center," says Arun Taneja, founder and president of The Taneja Group.
The Steelhead 7050 is a WAN optimization appliance where the persistent data store is 100 percent resident on SSDs, minimizing disk access times and latency to allow it to deliver the speed necessary to handle extreme work loads. The Steelhead 7050 optimizes up to 100,000 concurrent optimized TCP connections and up to one Gigabit per second WAN-side throughput, and utilizes up to four 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) network interface cards.
"We depend on Riverbed for everything, acceleration of our centralized applications, protection of our data through replicated backup to our corporate data center, and to facilitate collaboration between offices sharing project related work. With the introduction of the Steelhead 7050, Riverbed has given us the opportunity to scale reliably and performance that we've never been able to achieve before. As our storage environment grows, the new appliance should allow us to scale to meet the replication needs for all of our EMC platforms, including SAN, NAS, CAS, and Data Domain, to our disaster recovery site," said Wes Owen, Manager of Infrastructure Services at HNTB Corp.
Riverbed has an eco-system of alliances with storage partners, including Brocade, Compellent, Dell EqualLogic, Double-Take Software, EMC and NetApp. These partners recognize the value that the Steelhead 7050 model appliances provide in enabling enterprises to elevate their disaster recovery (DR) strategies and maximize their infrastructure.
"Our customers rely on EMC storage to enable their disaster recovery strategies. We look forward to working with Riverbed in enhancing that strategy for customers through its release of its next generation Steelhead appliance," said Deirdre Wassell, director of storage product marketing, at EMC.
The Steelhead 7050 comes equipped with up to 28 SSDs that allow for higher throughput for read, write and search performance. Faster throughput shortens the time required to move data across the WAN to DR sites, allowing enterprises to protect more data, more often. It also delivers greater scale for accelerating branch office computing. The Steelhead 7050 also offers data reduction capabilities free up more bandwidth for business-critical applications, often reducing WAN traffic as much as 60 to 95 percent.
Enterprises face stringent recovery point objective (RPO)/recovery time objective (RTO) requirements, necessitating that WAN optimization appliances be as resilient as the underlying storage hardware in order to ensure business continuity. To help businesses achieve business continuity, SSDs in the Steelhead 7050 model appliances are leveraged for datastore fault tolerance. This is a unique feature, analogous to RAID (redundant array of independent disks) for disks, where if one of the SSDs fails, the Steelhead appliance maintains high throughput and continues to optimize data using the remaining disks. IT managers can replace SSDs and be up and running again quickly to minimize data reduction degradation.
Steelhead 7050 provides high WAN capacity. Steelhead 7050 can support up to four 10 GbE SR cards and is equipped to handle up to 100,000 connections, offering a scalable solution. Riverbed further extended the scalability of WAN optimization with the introduction of the Interceptor 9350 in October 2009, which enables the clustering of individual Steelhead appliances to meet the requirements of very large data center environments with up to 12 Gb/s (gigabits-per-second) total aggregate throughput and 1,000,000 concurrent connections.
The Steelhead 7050L optimizes up to 75,000 concurrent TCP connections and is equipped with 14 SSDs. The Steelhead 7050M optimizes up to 100,000 concurrent TCP connections and is equipped with 28 SSDs.
"As our customers are enhancing their data center capabilities and building out private cloud environments, they are increasingly dependent on their network for everything from branch office computing to large-scale disaster recovery processes. We are committed to breaking down performance barriers within enterprises' current network infrastructure and keeping it reliable, inexpensive and simple," said Apurva Davé, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed. "With the release of Steelhead 7050, distributed enterprises can ensure that IT performance is not a limiting factor in DR efforts or instantaneous access to business-critical applications."
The Steelhead 7050 model appliances are expected to be generally available in the first quarter of this year.
