Application acceleration vendor Riverbed Technology has released new hardware and software to ensure quality of service over WAN links. The offerings may appeal to IT managers wishing to accelerate data transfers and avoid jitter for applications such as voice over IP (VoIP).
Riverbed released five new Steelhead appliances, the 1520, 3020, 3520, 5520 and 6020. All but the 1520 are designed for large offices and datacentres.
The high-end 6020 can support WAN bandwidth equivalent to two OC-3 connections for a total of 310Mbit/s, or 800Mbit/s with no disk de-duplication (so each file is only saved once), and has an onboard data capacity of 700GB.
Riverbed also launched the Interceptor 9200, a new load-balancing appliance to optimise TCP connections to the new hardware and older appliances, and it upgraded its Riverbed Optimisation System (RiOS) to version 3.
“The Interceptor is effectively a switch for automatically load-balancing our Steelhead appliances which was developed to meet a particular customer requirement,” said Riverbed’s Mark Lewis.
The 9200 can scale up to 4Gbit/s throughput and one million TCP connections. RiOS 3.0 adds quality of service for all traffic, optimises Unix NFS, has more Cifs and Mapi optimisations and adds support for Cisco’s Netflow reporting protocol and for asymmetric routing where firms have not enabled connection forwarding. “IP voice can’t be accelerated, but quality of service can be applied to minimise jitter and dropouts,” added Lewis.
Riverbed's new systems arrived a week after Citrix and Microsoft announced plans to launch an appliance based on Citrix's WANScaler architecture and running Microsoft’s Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server on top of Microsoft Server 2003 R2. The appliance, due next year, will challenge Cisco, Juniper and other vendors of WAN accelerators and optimisation systems in a major battle for market share in branch offices, analysts predicted.
The new Steelhead appliances, the Interceptor and RiOS version 3 are all available now. The high-end 6020 Steelhead costs £63,200 + VAT and the Interceptor costs £26,300 + VAT.
