Extend partnership to deliver performance management solution for SDNs; bring optimization to the virtual data center

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 27 — Riverbed Technology, the performance company, today announced an extension of its strategic partnership with VMware with the introduction of a performance management solution for software-defined networks (SDN) and the ability to provision wide area network (WAN) optimization for virtual data centers (VDC). The planned Riverbed solutions will ensure the operational viability and performance of VMware-based SDNs and VDCs. Riverbed Cascade product family support for VXLAN will provide IT organizations with an application-aware network performance management (NPM) solution for SDN performance management. In addition, Riverbed Steelhead Cloud Edition will be further integrated with VMware vCloud Director to simplify deployment, configuration, and management of wide area network (WAN) optimization-as-a-service for the VDC. Riverbed also announced that it intends to release additional Cascade products in virtual editions with the introduction of Cascade Profiler Virtual Edition and Cascade Gateway Virtual Edition.

"Our partnership with Riverbed was founded on the goal to help enterprises accelerate their journey to the cloud and enable businesses to increase efficiency and improve productivity while reducing costs. Rigid networking and security architectures based on purpose-built hardware and fragmented management interfaces pose a barrier to achieving the promise of the software-defined data center," said Allwyn Sequeira, vice president and CTO, networking and security, at VMware. "This latest collaboration with Riverbed brings the needed visibility and performance to address the challenges associated with the next evolution of virtualization, and enables customers to embrace SDNs."

Performance Management for Software-Defined Network and the Virtualized Data Center
SDNs are one of the cornerstones of the VDC. At the heart of this trend in network virtualization is VXLAN overlay technology that enables the quick and dynamic configuration of virtual networks in minutes. By creating virtual networks on demand, which can span physical boundaries, enterprises can optimize computing and storage capacity for mission-critical applications. With virtual overlay networks, traffic is encapsulated in tunnels across the physical network, which creates blind spots for the understanding and troubleshooting of performance issues.

Riverbed and VMware are collaborating in the development of a new VXLAN-aware Internet Protocol Flow Information Export (IPFIX) format. This functionality would enable network and application performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting, allowing organizations to embrace SDNs without sacrificing operational control.

The Riverbed Cascade product family is an application-aware NPM solution to leverage this performance information about overlay network and UDP-encapsulated traffic to provide comprehensive and unified visibility across the WAN, LAN, virtual overlay networks and data centers in the cloud. Access to this information enables network and virtualization teams to find and fix network and application performance problems, regardless of the architecture - traditional, server virtualized, or fully virtualized with SDNs. With the planned enhancements, Riverbed Cascade products will provide network operations teams with the ability to:

• Control and understand VXLAN virtual overlay network performance
• Monitor and troubleshoot VDCs and the physical network in a single, elegantly-designed solution
• Provide VDC owners isolated views into their virtual data center performance and SLAs
• Deploy a completely virtual performance management solution for SDNs and VDCs with Cascade Profiler Virtual Edition, Cascade Gateway Virtual Edition, and Virtual Cascade Shark software

"VXLAN will play a major role in deploying virtual networks with the same simplicity and operational ease that enterprises expect with virtual machines. However, it will be imperative for IT organizations to have visibility into the traffic flowing across virtual networks in order to maintain control and ensure security and compliance policies," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Riverbed and VMware are taking a collaborative and integrated approach to solving the next wave of challenges associated with network performance management in a fully virtualized or cloud environment by delivering comprehensive monitoring and troubleshooting for SDNs."

Standardize, Simplify, and Automate Cloud Services
In May 2012, Riverbed and VMware joined forces to improve performance and flexibility for moving workloads between clouds. The combination of Riverbed WAN optimization and VMware vCloud Connector solutions enable enterprises and service providers to maximize their cloud computing offerings by empowering customers to utilize their existing IT investments.

As part of this effort, Riverbed and VMware are continuing to further advance this solution to better enable all the benefits of cloud optimization while delivering enterprises and service providers the flexibility, control, and agility they require. The VMware vCloud integration will standardize WAN optimization deployments in virtual environments and automates these deployment processes as part of mission critical solutions. Using VMware vCloud Director and vCloud Networking & Security (vCNS), customers will be able to easily enable Riverbed Steelhead Cloud Edition capabilities into their cloud infrastructure. The integration would fully automate the deployment and management of the Steelhead Cloud Edition while vCNS Edge integration ensures traffic redirection to the Steelhead Cloud Edition for fully automated optimization. This standardization and automation will allow enterprises and service providers that use vCloud Director to simply develop and deploy optimized solutions, increase their return on investment, decrease time to market, and provide high-performance cloud offerings to the marketplace.

"SDNs will bring to enterprises, service providers, and systems integrators the next evolution of the virtualized IT environment, with benefits that include the ability to create complete virtual data centers in minutes and deliver quickly hybrid cloud solutions," said Eric Wolford, executive vice president at Riverbed. "Our partnership with VMware will help deliver on the promise of SDNs by providing the needed management and performance solutions to operate and deliver IT services at the infrastructure level."

For more information and a demonstration of Riverbed Cascade products and the Steelhead Cloud Edition, visit the Riverbed booth (#723).

Additional Resources

• Riverbed-VMware Partnership
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Riverbed Blog
• Riverbed Community
• Twitter (@Riverbed)
• YouTube

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.

-----

Source: Riverbed Technology, Inc.