New Riverbed Steelhead appliance supports data centre-to-data centre replication

Riverbed Technology, an application performance infrastructure provider, has expanded its Riverbed Steelhead wide area network (WAN) optimisation product family with the Steelhead DX Edition 8000 Series, allowing organisations to transfer and protect more data more often, with less risk and cost while recovering data more rapidly to improve business continuity.

Today, organisations are challenged with maintaining service-level agreements, such as Recovery Point and Time Objectives (RPO/RTO), that are associated with mission-critical business continuity and disaster recovery processes. They must ensure fast and predictable WAN performance despite common WAN performance impairments such as latency, packet loss, limited bandwidth and competition among applications.

The Steelhead DX Edition 8000 Series offers a solution through accelerating data transfers over long distances. Datacentre-to-datacentre data replication workloads can be executed with up to 60 times WAN performance acceleration and up to 99% bandwidth reduction.  
 
“The new Steelhead DX Edition eliminates distance between datacentres as a barrier to achieving true location-independent computing, which in this case means that data can be moved, stored and backed-up regardless of where facilities are located, but with performance similar to a local area network. Only Riverbed offers a complete solution for both large-scale branch-to-datacenter and datacentre-to-datacentre environments,” said Paul O’Farrell, Senior VP and GM, Steelhead Products Group, Riverbed.

“Maintaining fast and predictable WAN performance into and between datacentres has become critical for many of today’s enterprises,” said Brad Casemore, Research Director at IDC.  “Protecting data within and across multiple datacentres is essential to keeping a business online and operational. The challenge is doing so without generating ever increasing operational cost and risk, even as data sets and replication workloads continue to increase.”  

The Steelhead DX Edition 8000 Series supports up to 2 Gbps of optimised WAN capacity and up to 10 Gbps of optimised LAN capacity while optimising up to 10,000 TCP and UDP application flows. In addition, the solution provides unique optimisations for data replication applications such as NetApp SnapMirror and EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF), providing advanced performance, enhanced visibility and fine-grain control of data replication processes end-to-end across the WAN.