Riverbed Technology has announced that it has expanded its Riverbed Steelhead wide area network (WAN) optimisation product family, delivering the Steelhead DX Edition 8000 Series, delivering up to 60 times WAN performance acceleration and up to 99% bandwidth reduction.

“The Steelhead product family is already the most complete WAN optimisation solution in the market, and with this announcement we added another important and business-critical use case,” says Steelhead Products Group, Riverbed senior vice president and general manager, Paul O’Farrell.

“The new Steelhead DX Edition eliminates distance between data centres as a barrier to achieving true location-independent computing, which in this case means that data can be moved, stored and backed-up regardless of where facilities are located, but with performance similar to a local area network. Only Riverbed offers a complete solution for both large-scale branch-to-data centre and data centre-to-data centre environments.”

Today, WAN performance plays a central role in strategic business initiatives such as data centre consolidation, centralisation of branch servers and storage and transitioning from tape-based backup to WAN-based data replication. Given the rapid growth in data combined with these initiatives that are consolidating more data in fewer data centres, organisations are struggling to maintain the service-level agreements, such as Recovery Point and Time Objectives (RPO/RTO), associated with mission-critical business continuity and disaster recovery processes. To transfer and protect more data more often, organisations must ensure fast and predictable WAN performance despite common WAN performance impairments − high latency, packet loss, limited bandwidth and competition among applications, while protecting the bottom line by eliminating the unnecessary costs and delays associated with WAN infrastructure upgrades.

“Maintaining fast and predictable WAN performance into and between data centres has become critical for many of today’s enterprises,” says IDC research director Brad Casemore.

“Protecting data within and across multiple data centres is essential to keeping a business online and operational. The challenge is doing so without generating ever increasing operational cost and risk, even as data sets and replication workloads continue to increase.”

The Steelhead DX Edition 8000 Series features software and hardware purpose-built and optimised for data centre-to-data centre workloads. Supporting up to 2 Gbps of optimised WAN capacity and up to 10 Gbps of optimised LAN capacity while optimising up to 10,000 TCP and UDP application flows, Steelhead DX Edition 8000 Series delivers superior value for accelerating data transfers over long distance.

In addition, the solution provides unique optimisations for data replication applications such as NetApp SnapMirror and EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF), providing advanced performance, enhanced visibility and fine-grain control of data replication processes end-to-end across the WAN.