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Riverbed Scales Up

Still twiddling its thumbs on that IPO, Riverbed Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: RVBD) is passing the time with a product release, including a 3.0 software revision and a new set of hardware aimed at increasing the scale of deployments.

The new hardware and software are slated for official release on Aug. 30.

Riverbed says customers have become comfortable enough with the technology that they now want to install it across larger swaths of the network, scaling to thousands of remote sites. (See Riverbed Makes It Official and Riverbed Hedges IPO Bet.)

The granddaddy of the new boxes is the Interceptor 9200, a hub for clustering Riverbed's Steelhead appliances for a maximum of 4-Gbit/s throughput -- served through 12 Gigabit Ethernet ports -- and 1 million connections. "There are at least five companies we're working with that have to do this because their deployments are that large," says Eric Wolford, Riverbed's senior vice president of marketing and business development.

Riverbed is also beefing up the capacity of the Steelheads beyond the previous maximum of 45 Mbit/s. The Steelhead 5520 offers one OC3 (155 Mbit/s) worth of bandwidth, and the 6020 provides twice that. Wolford notes that those numbers are with disk deduplication turned on, whereas some competitors are able to quote higher numbers by keeping deduplication turned off.

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