Ongoing collaboration gives customers flexibility and acceleration when moving virtualized machines within a multi-cloud environment

SAN FRANCISCO, May 2 — Riverbed Technology, the performance company, today announced a continued partnership with VMware, which was developed to help enterprises accelerate their journey to the cloud, enabling businesses to increase efficiency and improve productivity while reducing costs. With the latest collaboration, Riverbed wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions accelerate virtual machines (VMs) moving between clouds — private, public and hybrid — with VMware vCloud Connector. The combination of Riverbed and VMware solutions can enable cloud service providers to maximize their cloud computing offerings by empowering their customers to utilize their existing IT investments.

Built upon VMware vSphere 5 and VMware vCloud APIs, VMware vCloud Connector allows customers to connect VMware vSphere and VMware vCloud Director-based private and public clouds and manage them through a single interface. When moving and replicating data across the WAN, challenges may arise due to bandwidth constraints, high latency in the network and packet loss – all of which can result in delays. Riverbed and VMware's solutions can help customers overcome these challenges, enabling companies to realize the benefits of utilizing multiple cloud environments without compromising performance. The Riverbed WAN optimization solution delivers significant performance gains when moving large VMs across the WAN, while giving the ability to reduce the time to move VMs and costs associated with WAN infrastructure.

"Xtium partners with market leaders like Riverbed and VMware to offer enterprise solutions that enhance the security, compliance, and performance of applications, helping ensure that applications are delivered efficiently and effectively from the cloud to our customer's doorstep," said Tim Vogel, chief technology officer at Xtium. "Their solutions enable our customers to move VMs between public-to-public, public and private, and private-to-private clouds, resulting in the greatest flexibility of deployment for the best possible performance."

Delivering Performance in a Virtualized World
Riverbed and VMware have a history of collaborating to consolidate and simplify IT infrastructure, enhance disaster recovery strategies, and accelerate virtualization and cloud technologies. Recent collaborative developments include:

• Innovative IT Consolidation: The new Steelhead EX appliance with Virtual Services Platform (VSP) has a dedicated platform that runs virtual services for greater consolidation in branch offices. Each Steelhead EX appliance utilizes VMware virtualization technology to run virtualized instances of an organization's own services, including DNC, DHCP, Active Directory, print service, streaming media, security service, or third-party software.
• Performance Visibility into the Virtual Machine: Virtual Cascade Shark provides the needed real-time visibility to manage and troubleshoot application performance as it traverses the virtual switch in VMware vSphere environments.
• Accelerating VDI Environments: Riverbed partnered with Teradici, the developer of the innovative PC-over-IP protocol that delivers a true PC experience for desktop virtualization. The partnership is designed to address IT infrastructure performance, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for VMware View environments, which can provide an unparalleled experience for VMware View users.
• Accelerating Data Center-to-Data Center Replication: Riverbed Steelhead appliances accelerate VMware vSphere Replication to address the challenges of replicating data across the wide area network (WAN) in cloud and virtualized environments, for improving business continuity and disaster recovery.

As part of this continued collaboration announced today, an extensive test conducted by Riverbed and VMware confirmed interoperability, and resulted in significant performance benefits for onboarding VMs on to a private or public cloud in a Riverbed optimized WAN environment. Testing was performed using VMware vCloud Connector to transfer virtual machine images with and without the Steelhead appliance, in a variety of real-world WAN network conditions. The test result showed that the Steelhead appliance, with WAN-like latency emulated between two VMware vCenter Servers, reduced transfer time by up to 75x.

"Businesses all over the world are turning to virtualization and cloud computing to simplify their IT infrastructure, consolidating, and moving applications to the cloud," said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. "To support this trend, Riverbed and VMware continue to innovate to provide additional value and benefits for our customers' existing investments. This latest collaboration with Riverbed optimizes and accelerates the moving of VMs between VMware vSphere and VMware vCloud, improving business flexibility and productivity, and making it faster and easier to gain the benefits of cloud computing."

"With the growth of virtualization and cloud computing, performance requirements have never been more critical to business operations," said Venugopal Pai, vice president of Global Alliances at Riverbed. "Building on Riverbed's partnership with VMware, this latest collaboration brings together the best-of-breed Riverbed Steelhead products with VMware vCloud Connector, delivering an innovative solution for utilizing different cloud environments, reducing costs, and improving data integrity for customers."

More than 17,000 organizations worldwide depend on Riverbed to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT infrastructure, through solutions that overcome performance issues caused by distance, distributed computing, and ever increasing amounts of data. As IT organizations embark on strategic initiatives to virtualize, consolidate and migrate workloads into cloud environments, users are moved farther from their data, and slow applications, file transfers and inefficient websites negatively impact the performance of these initiatives. Riverbed transforms IT performance by providing solutions spanning wide area network (WAN) optimization, edge virtual server infrastructure (edge-VSI) , application-aware network performance management (NPM), application delivery, web content optimization (WCO), and cloud data protection for backup and disaster recovery. By providing the broadest portfolio of performance solutions that deliver anywhere, any application optimization, Riverbed enables organizations to increase productivity and efficiency, while enhancing business resilience and controlling costs.

Additional Resources

• VMware vCloud Connector and Riverbed Steelhead WAN Optimization Solution Brief:
  http://www.riverbed.com/vmware/media/docs/SolutionBrief-VMWare-Riverbed-AcceleratingYourMovetotheCloud.pdf
• Riverbed and VMware Partner Solution Brief:
  http://www.riverbed.com/assets/media/documents/briefs/SolutionBrief-EMC_Riverbed.pdf

About Riverbed

Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed is available at www.riverbed.com.

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Source: Riverbed Technology