Low WAN bandwidth? Fret not

BANGALORE, INDIA: The Y2K problem in a way was a blessing in disguise. It is after this 'scare' that the companies across the globe started looking at reducing costs. One of the things that emerged on every CIO's mind that time was to consolidate IT infrastructure, which could be done by reducing the number of data centers.

The companies then started to look at global arena. Their aspirations to go global forced them to consolidate their IT infrastructure. As the distance between the user and the application increased, the problem of slow application response also started cropping up.

This is when the birth of Riverbed happened. The company concentrated on solving problems related to application performance. It dealt with CIOs' issues and helped them innovate. In this interview with CIOL, Anil Batra, its India MD, talks about the company and its offerings.

CIOL: Why is Wide Area Network (WAN) important?

Batra: The most critical part of any organization is productivity. Every company is looking to increase productivity with lesser number of workforce. They are also looking to enhance performance. We have today gone from just a WAN optimization controller to a complete performance platform.

We take care of the bandwidth, have algorithms that reduce the costs that are associated with bandwidths by de-duplicating it. Hence, data that has already gone across the network need not to be sent again. As a result, the next time you have to send data, it is only the key that goes, as the data has already gone and the new one gets indexed to that. This process helps the cost of bandwidth to be reduced.

Suppose that you are working on your PC and try to get access to an application, before you start receiving data, you will have to send requests followed by an acknowledgment. You will have to send another request and the process continues till you get a response. We have come up with a way which helps you take away the chattiness of the application. This helps in a way to improve the performance of an application. We manage the bandwidth, optimize it and also accelerate the application.

CIOL: What are all your products?

We are offering the following solution in this area:

a. Steelhead: The Riverbed Steelhead products dramatically improve WAN performance for a wide range of applications and scale — from individual remote workers to small branch offices to the biggest data centers. These products also offers the most comprehensive approach to application acceleration and disaster recovery across the WAN.

b. Stingay: Our Riverbed Stingray products control, optimize and secure the services that online users receive, by inspecting, transforming, prioritizing and routing application traffic. With Stingray in place, enterprises can enable autoscaling applications on demand, balancing across multiple clouds, and leveraging existing datacenter investments.

c. Cascade: Riverbed Cascade is the first integrated network assessment and acceleration solution. It combines network and application visibility, collects vast amounts of data from devices, and analyzes network behavior to find the source of any performance problems before they affect the end user.

d. Whitewater: Riverbed Whitewater unlocks the efficiency and reliability of public cloud storage for organizations of all sizes. With de-duplication, encryption, network acceleration, and no changes to existing infrastructure, Whitewater makes public cloud storage a secure, low-cost, and reliable storage alternative to tape or on-site disk.

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CIOL: How quick is the response time Riverbed’s products offer?

Batra: Our products offer around 40 to 50 times increase in response time. At times, it increases 100 times. There are cases in which a file takes 50 minutes to get downloaded. But with Riverbed’s products, the time has come down to about 3 minutes.

CIOL: What is the potential for WAN Optimization in the Indian market?

Batra: India has a tremendous potential. There is a huge prospect from an India perspective with the availability of the IT/ITES industry, huge automobile and ancillary industry and the great talent available here. The bandwidths in India are not really good. As the companies are global, the cost of bandwidth across the world is very high. So, we can help optimize the bandwidths in order to reduce costs. We can also optimize the applications along with it.

CIOL: Do you have any customers in India and in which verticals?

Batra: We have a large number of customers in India across the manufacturing, BFSI, services, government, and public sectors. We cover a huge spectrum of clients. Across all the industries, the applications and challenges with regards to IT are the same and hence we can serve customers across all verticals.

CIOL: What are your future plans in India?

Batra: The demand for WAN optimization in India is huge. Our challenge is to make our partners understand our technology and help our customers. We are expanding our base so that we can reach our customers and talk to them on a frequent basis and bring our product advantages to them. In a potential market like India, the real challenge is that how to cover the market and address the needs of all the customers.

CIOL: What according to you will be the challenges for CIOs in future?

Batra: CIOs are no longer just technology people. They are fully into the business and are business owners as well. Businesses are going global and they need to run their applications and IT infrastructure. CIOs will hence have to make their IT infrastructure cost effective, appropriate and efficient.

‘Consolidation’ is the real need of a CIO and this is their biggest challenge. Data center and Disaster Recovery are very important and no company can afford to lose data anymore.

CIOL: What are the new age solutions for the connected enterprises?

Batra: We have something called a ‘Mobile steelhead controller’, which can be downloaded into your mobile phone. It is an application through which you can gain the benefits of optimization even while you are on the go.

CIOL: Your features are very similar to Compuware's APM tools. So, what are the unique features of Riverbed’s products?

Batra: We make a wide area network look like a local area network and this increases the IT performance of an organization. We do a combination of a lot of things. Some of our unique features are WAN Optimization, Visibility tool, Virtual ADC. These are very suitable to application developers and none of our competition offers this product. A combination of this makes us a very strong player in the market.