Cloud
Leverage Cloud Services to Reduce Costs and Improve Business Processes

Business Overview:

Riverbed helps your business run faster by accelerating cloud services and reducing IT costs. On average, customers cut bandwidth utilization by 70-90 percent and experience up to 100 times faster application performance. They reduce the number of servers they need to provision and yet get the power of multiple servers in one office, even though they are paying for one. They save millions of dollars by consolidating branch servers and avoiding the refresh cost of hundreds of devices. In fact, IDC notes that Riverbed customers see payback on average in about six months.

Boost Productivity & Improve Business Processes

Accelerate performance, raise productivity, and eliminate the impact of distance between branch offices, mobile workers, the data center, and business headquarters.

• Improve the performance of many of the most commonly used applications across the network, typically by 5-50 times and, in some cases, by up to 100 times.
• Accelerate operations by reducing the time required to complete repetitive tasks.
• Ensure fast, reliable access to data and applications for employees around the globe.
• Achieve LAN-like performance so that mobile employees can upload, send, and share files from virtually anywhere.
• Reduce the cost of backing up branch office servers.
• Tightly integrate resource planning systems and product lifecycle platforms with distributed employees — including mobile workers.
• Enable a “branch in a box” concept, which allows new offices to be equipped with a simple IT infrastructure consisting of a router, VPN, IP phone, and  SteelHead products.

Save Money & Achieve Measurable ROI

Deliver strategic value while helping your IT team cut unnecessary costs.

• Reduce the use of WAN bandwidth by 65-95 percent and relieve network congestion.
• Cut server costs and routine IT maintenance. 
• Consolidate servers into data centers more effectively and enable virtualization, without impacting performance.

Accomplish Key Business Initiatives

Use WAN optimization to build a consolidated, private cloud infrastructure. Cut costs and simplify infrastructure to accommodate new growth and new technology demands.

• Consolidation and virtualization — Centralize IT infrastructure including servers across branch offices and data centers, file, email, and storage into one cloud environment.
• Cloud acceleration — Accelerate applications faster. Installing SteelHead appliances from Riverbed increases performance across the WAN by streamlining data and transport by up to 100 times. This accelerates access to the cloud and accelerates the movement of virtualized machines and data to cloud data centers.
• Collaboration — Move files and applications across offices faster. Employees spend less time uploading and sending files and more time collaborating with each other and customers.
• Real-time performance — Share applications, documents, email, design files, and software as if employees across the globe were all operating from the same location.
• Productivity — Deploy SteelHead products to reduce network congestion and speed up data throughput so your workers can do their jobs faster.
• Visibility — Gain visibility of WAN traffic and optimization status, all from a single web interface. Install and customize in minutes through plug-and-play installation, with no changes to your existing clients and servers.

Technical Overview:

Like many large companies, you likely have hundreds of servers spread out across many data centers and offices. It’s a challenge for your IT team to maintain patch, upgrade, and back up all those servers.

Riverbed can help your business to accelerate, virtualize, and consolidate all of these distributed servers, and effectively utilize public or private cloud infrastructure. This frees your IT staff while helping your business run faster. Riverbed leads the market in IT performance through its SteelHead and Cascade product lines — helping customers to understand, optimize, and consolidate IT infrastructure throughout the data center, branch office, remote worker, and even the cloud.

Private Cloud Services

Accelerate your consolidated private cloud and maximize the productivity and performance of IT environments and businesses.

• Consolidate distributed IT resources and virtualize those resources in the data center.
• Provide more cost-effective management while serving up services faster.
• Remove significant strain on existing resources and reduce strain on performance.
• Remove wide-area networking performance barriers and remove barriers to bandwidth congestion, reducing the need to purchase more bandwidth.

Public Cloud Services

• Maximize performance, productivity, scale, and elasticity.
• Reduce cloud service costs.
• Increase adaptability for changing workloads as an operating expense, rather than a capital expense.
• Increase performance by having employees access applications from anywhere in the world.

Accelerate Cloud Services

Remove wide area networking performance barriers, enabling the effective use of cloud services.

• Provide market-leading WAN optimization technology through hardware appliances, software, and virtualized platforms.
• Cut bandwidth costs using a patented application algorithm to achieve massive-scale data deduplication.
• Accelerate access to private and public cloud infrastructure. The Riverbed solution layers TCP and application protocol on top of its data reduction technique to deliver WAN optimization.
• Accelerate the movement of virtualized machines and data to cloud data centers.
• Significantly reduce the bandwidth needed to support branch offices and data centers.
• Improve visibility into network utilization, application performance, and SLAs.

Accelerating Cloud Services:

Improving infrastructure performance

Cloud computing has become an important new tool for IT managers in controlling the cost and complexity of business-critical applications and data. Cloud computing is compelling to enterprises because it allows them to consolidate resources, provision services more quickly, and even rationalize costs more effectively with new business models.

However, there are numerous challenges with this approach that may prevent organizations from suceeding with cloud initiatives. These cloud initiatives may be private cloud (where server and storage resources live behind a corporate firewall) or public cloud (resources live in a shared datacenter, via a service such as Amazon EC2). In both cases, problems with application performance, available bandwidth, and visibility often limit the effective gains of a scalable cloud computing model. Addressing these limitations can be the difference between success or failure of a cloud-based system, which in turn can affect an organization's effectiveness and competitive advantage in its market.

Riverbed can provide a complete WAN optimization solution to accelerate cloud services and add a layer of intelligence to ensure that consolidated, virtualized applications and services are accessed by end-users everywhere in a way that enables them to be productive, while helping to deliver the expected cost and management efficiencies.

Typical Private Cloud Deployment Architecture with WAN Optimization

Private Cloud Services

Private cloud services enable IT departments to do more with the infrastructure that they have already have. In a typical private cloud deployment, enterprises undertake the consolidation of distributed IT resources and apply virtualization to those resources in the data center. This enables IT to provide more cost-effective management while spinning up services faster.

However, private cloud deployments can put significant strain on existing resources and work processes. As IT departments consolidate resources, applications and data are typically moved further away from many end users. Branch office employees and mobile workers now are required to go further across the wide-area network (WAN) to get the information they need. The resulting latency can often dramatically reduce performance, and make the business less productive overall.

At the same time, the consolidation will put more strain on the available bandwidth connecting branch offices to the data center. With consolidated resources, many more user requests will go back to the data center. The WAN will be responsible for carrying significantly more traffic, which could lead to bandwidth congestion, or even force the enterprise to purchase more bandwidth.

Public Cloud Services

Utilizing a service provider's infrastructure or platform allows enterprises to integrate the public cloud into their IT infrastructure. A public cloud service allows the enterprise to rent compute power and storage, and is usually billed on a discrete basis. Public cloud services are compelling because of scale and elasticity – a service provider supporting thousands of businesses can drive lower costs than any one business alone, and can provide adaptability for changing workloads as an operating expense rather than a capital expense.

One of the major challenges with the adoption of public clouds is performance. Moving services to a public cloud means that enterprises must accept that their applications can potentially be run from anywhere in the world – wherever the data center of the service provider happens to be. Most public cloud services do not specify data center locations in their terms of service, maximizing their freedom to migrate work to reduce their operating costs. In essence, the distance (and latency) in accessing applications may significantly increase for everyone in the enterprise. More surprisingly, those distances may change unpredictably.

Accelerating Cloud Services

Whether an enterprise develops a private cloud service, uses a public cloud service, or (more likely) decides to use some combination of both, WAN optimization enables organizations to attain the cost, scale, and manageability benefits of cloud offerings while gaining the performance levels and visibility needed for a productive workforce. With WAN optimization solutions from Riverbed, customers can:

• Accelerate access to private and public cloud infrastructure
• Accelerate the movement of virtualized machines and data to cloud data centers
• Significantly reduce the bandwidth needed to support branch offices and data centers
• Improve visibility into network utilization, application performance, and SLAs.

Riverbed removes wide-area networking performance barriers, enabling the effective use of cloud services. Riverbed provides its market-leading WAN optimization technology through hardware appliances, software, and virtualized platforms. Riverbed enables customers to accelerate a broad range of applications to end users everywhere.

SteelHead Cloud Accelerator:

SteelHead Cloud Accelerator is used by enterprises and organizations to improve application performance and to manage the delivery of business-critical data and content from a SaaS provider’s public cloud infrastructure. With SteelHead Cloud Accelerator, customers are now able to extend the same performance benefits that they’ve enjoyed for their centralized enterprise applications, to SaaS products such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps.

This unique solution from market leaders Riverbed and Akamai allows customers to reap these benefits from their existing infrastructure without requiring costly hardware upgrades.

Summary

Cloud SteelHead removes barriers to enterprise-class public cloud deployments by combining market leading Riverbed WAN optimization with features that are purpose-built for public cloud environments. Those features include:

• Transparent cloud interception: Provides seamless integration into public cloud environments
• Flexible Cloud Pricing Model: Subscription pricing with terms as short as six months.
• Simple, portal-based management: Connect to Amazon Web Services and ESX-based public clouds to deploy Cloud SteelHead in just a few clicks
• Elastic sizing and easy Cloning: On-demand upgrades

Cloud SteelHead offers validated technical compatibility with a number of cloud service provider partners, including Terremark Cloud Computing, ZettaServe, and Xtium, and solution technology partners including CloudSwitch and Media Platform.

Business

Shrinking budgets that drive IT consolidation initiatives are leading to the rapid adoption of a hybrid cloud model, where applications are delivered across some combination of a company’s own traditional data centers, as well as public cloud environments. In order to unlock the cost savings promised by cloud services, enterprises are seeking ways to make use of infrastructure elasticity – using on-demand bursting to meet peaks in demand, using multiple geographically dispersed cloud infrastructures. Software as a service (SaaS) is one of the key technology trends that customers are deploying to outsource some enterprise application needs such as sales operations (eg : Salesforce.com) or even traditional enterprise applications (Office 365).

The similarities between private data centers and public cloud data centers forces users further from their data and this distance causes difficulties due to the constraints of bandwidth and latency on the network. While customers may be used to improved performance within their private clouds with the use of WAN optimization, they are looking for a similar solution as they move to public clouds or employ some combination of public and private clouds.

The SteelHead Cloud Accelerator is a first of its kind solution jointly developed by Riverbed and Akamai that combines award winning and market leading WAN optimization technology, the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), from Riverbed with Akamai’s best-in-class internet route optimization technology (SureRoute) for accelerating SaaS application performance to the end user. This solution is a license add-on to existing SteelHead appliance deployments and does not require any changes in the way SteelHead appliances are deployed today or any changes on the SaaS provider’s infrastructure. RiOS will be installed on Akamai’s SureRoute gateways to be activated whenever a customer purchases a license. The RiOS instance on the Akamai gateway will then optimize content and applications to the SteelHead appliance deployed within the customer’s enterprise network.

This offering is priced on a subscription basis in keeping with the model SaaS providers typically price and sell their offerings.

Highlights of the SteelHead Cloud Accelerator Include:

• Improve performance of SaaS applications by up to 100x
• Best of breed solution combining Internet optimization with WAN optimization
• Leverage existing Riverbed and Akamai infrastructure with no need for additional hardware

Technical

SteelHead Cloud Accelerator features a number of distinct elements that set it apart from the competition.

These Include:

• Optimization Everywhere – Regardless of where end users are located, what applications they are using, or where the applications reside, end users get optimal application performance. SteelHead Cloud Accelerator delivers fast, secure and available applications for software as a service providers like Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, and Salesforce.com.
• Overcome Network Performance Constraints - Realize the promise of cloud for applications on-demand and balance across multiple clouds, keeping end-users productive and happy with accelerated SaaS performance. The Award winning RiOS optimization combined with the Akamai network can accelerate applications up to 100x.
• Leverage Existing Infrastructure Investment - Accelerate your SaaS applications easily, without requiring any configuration changes or rip-and-replace of existing hardware. Take advantage of the economics of cloud by seamlessly delivering applications than span both public and private infrastructures.
• Save on Bandwidth - Reduce traffic on backhaul links, and obviate the need for bandwidth upgrades.
• Combine the best Internet optimization with the best WAN optimization. Akamai’s Sure Route technology finds the best route between the end user and the SaaS provider often minimizing transit for data to a single network hop. This combined with Riverbed’s deduplication and application acceleration technology makes enterprises feel like they are hosting SaaS applications within their own data centers.
• Leverage Akamai’s deployment footprint. Use Akamai’s hundreds of thousands of content caching servers to get as close to the SaaS provider’s data center as possible for complete end-to-end optimization of data from the service provider’s gateway direct to the enterprise user.