BANGALORE, INDIA: Riverbed Technology, a wide-area data services (WDS) company, announced an OEM agreement to embed VMware software as the preferred virtualisation platform for the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), a virtualised service delivery solution within Steelhead appliances.

With the VMware platform inside Steelhead appliances, enterprises can further consolidate their IT infrastructure and improve manageability by running up to five remote office virtual edge services, without the need for separate dedicated servers.

This approach will allow them to improve asset utilisation, operational efficiency and business agility, while helping to control IT costs and ensure end-user satisfaction. Services currently available for deployment on the RSP include streaming media, print services, and DNS/DHCP/IPAM.

Joe Skorupa, research vice president for Gartner, Inc, said: "There is a strong trend within enterprises toward centralising servers and consolidating IT infrastructure. At the same time there are key applications and services that are required in remote locations. Working together, WAN optimisation and virtualisation technologies allow organisations to move forward with efforts to lower operational and capital costs through IT consolidation, while also ensuring that end-users have access to essential applications and services."

VMware-Based Virtualised Edge Services: Riverbed Services Platform (RSP)

VMware provides Riverbed with the most robust and widely deployed virtualisation platform available. More than 120,000 customers, including all of the Fortune 100, have used the VMware platform, which enables them to virtualise their data centres and help ensure business continuity.

Riverbed Steelhead appliances accelerate the performance of applications between data centres, remote offices and mobile workers by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times.

The award-winning Steelhead products make it possible for companies to consolidate IT and improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, while improving staff productivity and collaboration.

The RSP, which will be virtualised by VMware, is an extensible data services platform that allows customers to deploy best-of-breed edge services that formerly required dedicated servers as virtual appliances. Customers can deploy these virtual appliances directly on Steelhead products to further minimise the hardware infrastructure footprint at the branch office.