Riverbed Upgrade Focuses on SSL Acceleration

Riverbed Technology this week launched a new version of its application-acceleration technology that it says can be used to optimize SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) traffic without interfering with existing enterprise trust models.

Riverbed's RiOS (Riverbed Optimization System) 4.0 is the latest version of the underlying optimization technology running in the vendor's Steelhead optimization appliances. The software accelerates SSL-encrypted traffic without forcing certificates or private keys to be distributed to the edge, thus dodging potential key-management problems, Riverbed officials said.SSL traffic is often not accelerated due to the complexity of maintaining SSL encryption while applying acceleration techniques. Vendors have deployed differing approaches to enable SSL acceleration.

RiOS 4.0 also contains enhancements to its intelligent learning mechanism that discovers and tracks objects on Web pages, such as images, scripts and cascading style sheets. Once the server-side appliance is aware of those objects, it can transfer all of them in parallel to optimize WAN data transfer, with the application reassembled on the client side. The new version also improves Riverbed's existing high-speed TCP optimizations with MX-TCP or Max-Speed TCP, which works in conjunction with RiOS 4.0's QoS (quality of service) enforcement capabilities to further optimize WAN traffic.

Additional RiOS 4.0 features include enhanced autodiscovery to improve performance for complex enterprise environments and active-active synch enhancements that let customers create high-availability, hot-fail-over environments that ensure consistent WAN performance.

RiOS 4.0 will ship this month at no additional cost to Riverbed customers with existing support contracts. The vendor also is making available a license upgrade for its 1U Steelhead 520 and 1020 models, giving customers the option of increasing the number of TCP connections optimized to handle additional bandwidth or throughput from 300 to 1,000 links without requiring a major upgrade.

In related news this week, Blue Coat Systems announced the results of a WAN optimization survey of 1,300 IT executives from 40 countries. The survey found that about 35 percent of enterprises surveyed said SSL-encrypted traffic represents at least 25 percent of all traffic across their WANs. Overall, 53 percent of respondents said they have applications that communicate using SSL encryption, and 45 percent plan to deploy SSL-based apps in the next year.Blue Coat noted that it has offered the ability to affect and control SSL traffic for nearly a year within a trusted and secure proxy architecture.