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ShareNew Riverbed OS Accelerates Microsoft And More
Posted by David Greenfield on June 7, 2010
Riverbed Technology has announced version 6.1 of the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), the operating system underlying its WAN optimizers. With 6.1, Riverbed adds application optimization to a range of Microsoft suites, including Exchange 2010, SharePoint, and Microsoft Online for SharePoint and Exchange. It also adds support for Lotus Notes 8.5. Additionally, RiOS 6.1 delivers enhanced optimizations for disaster recovery (DR) performance by improving on storage networking protocols.
Application performance is critical as more apps traverse the WAN or the Internet. WAN acceleration products, such a those from Riverbed, Silverpeak, Blue Coat, F5, Cisco and others, can help ensure acceptable performance from cloud-based applications. "RiOS is a good move for organizations that want to take advantage of SaaS applications but have remote office locations with low bandwidth availability," says Michael Biddick, an analyst with InformationWeek Analytics and CTO of Fusion PPT. "However, organizations need to weigh the costs of WAN optimization appliances at all their branch offices compared with the cost to upgrade the network."
Riverbed aims to reduce both latency and the amount data on the WAN link for both encrypted and unencrypted Exchange 2010 traffic with the RiOS 6.1 release. The company claims as much as a 95 percent data reduction vs. non-optimized traffic. While Riverbed's support for the encrypted mode of Exchange 2010 is interesting, it's not entirely new. F5 Big-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) offers native Exchange 2010 encryption for end-to-end support as well as SSL offload, where only the link between the client and the WAN optimizer is encrypted.
RiOS 6.1 also extends Riverbed's optimization capabilities for SharePoint, which has become a business-critical application as enterprises strive to improve productivity by sharing documents and information in a collaborative environment. The new version accelerates traffic at both the network layer and application layer and eliminates unnecessary round trips associated with SharePoint authentication requests. The company claims the software upgrade reduces application latency and response times by up to 50 percent over previous versions.
"The Riverbed Steelhead appliances have allowed International Justice Mission (IJM) to accelerate application performance - especially e-mail and our centralized intranet and training running on SharePoint," says John Lax, Vice President of Information Systems at IJM. "These are critical applications for training our employees working in the field and communicating about rescue missions."
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