Riverbed upgrades Steelhead product family

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Riverbed Technology announced that it is evolving its Steelhead product family, which is used to accelerate the performance of applications over the wide area network (WAN).

The company is introducing two new product series, Steelhead CX and Steelhead EX. The Steelhead product family is powered by Riverbed Operating System (RiOS) software.

"While working with thousands of global organizations over the years, we've recognized a natural market segmentation. There are IT organizations that want WAN optimization for its core function -- to increase the performance of applications over the WAN for their distributed offices. There are other organizations that have a primary focus on consolidating their entire infrastructure," said Eric Wolford, executive vice president and GM, Products, Riverbed. "Our new high-performance product series meets the needs of both customer types."

Steelhead CX Series - The Steelhead CX series, like its predecessors in the xx50 series, overcomes bandwidth and geographic limitations and offers more capacity and throughput than previous Steelhead appliances, claims the company in a release.

Steelhead EX Series - The Steelhead EX builds on Riverbed's WAN optimization solution, and adds to that a platform with more memory, disk, and CPU to support the Virtual Services Platform (VSP) and Granite, which was introduced recently.

And, every appliance in the Steelhead EX series is supported by high-performance solid state drives (SSDs).

Every Steelhead EX appliance features the VSP, similar to the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) that runs on the xx50 series.

With the VSP, each appliance is designed to leaverage VMware virtualization technology to run virtualized instances of an organization's own services, including DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, print serving, streaming media, security service or third party software.

The Steelhead EX series can also be upgraded to include Riverbed Granite.