Application Performance & Collaboration
Our customers can accelerate their enterprise applications and increase their business productivity globally, with Riverbed solutions for high performance file sharing, email, web, ERP, CRM, CAD, and many more. They can improve collaboration and communication in their organization with high quality voice and video delivery.
Riverbed Technology enables your branch offices and mobile workforce to get more work done in more places. Whether your employees are at their branch offices, customer site, in a partner office, or visiting other offices within the company they can access files faster, collaborate with a global workforce in real-time, and realize increased productivity.
Summary:
Many enterprises believe WAN optimization simply reduces bandwidth utilization. But optimizing the network in this way — via compression, QoS, or TCP optimization — is only one part of the solution needed to truly improve application performance across the network and increase employee collaboration.
Unlike other approaches to application acceleration, Riverbed WAN optimization solutions can provide dramatic application performance increases across the broad range of applications that enterprises care about the most. Applications run five, 50, or even up to 100 times faster so that branch office and mobile workers can collaborate in real-time, design documents, Excel files, even send large email attachments at blazing speeds, around the world. Riverbed also gives your business visibility into its IT infrastructure so you can analyze whether your resources are being used in the best way.
Our comprehensive solution:
- Accelerates applications across the WAN, typically by five, 50, or even 100 times
- Delivers LAN-like performance to branch office and mobile workers around the world
- Improves the productivity of branch office and mobile workers and enables your company to do more with less
- Speeds file downloads
- Enhances visibility and simplifies management
- Reduces computing times and improves employee collaboration
- Lowers IT, operational, and training costs, and helps you avoid costly network upgrades
Riverbed delivers faster application response times, improved staff collaboration, more agile infrastructure at reduced IT costs, and lower bandwidth costs.
Business Overview:
Businesses move at light speeds today. They not only need a fast mobile workforce but also high performance, scalable IT solutions that match their business growth, and visibility into the IT infrastructure.
Riverbed solves the application performance challenge with WAN optimization.
SteelHead appliances from Riverbed outperform the competition by improving a company’s ability to deliver fast data services to remote offices, without having to install servers in every location. With SteelHead Mobile, data moves faster to any PC or laptop — mobile workers, home offices, and very small branch offices. Employees can download and send data as if they were in the office, be productive, and collaborate more.
Our appliances scale to any branch office, saving you thousands of dollars in reduced operating costs.
We provide visibility tools for management with at-a glance reporting on optimization and traffic visibility. Riverbed Cascade analyzes traffic for faster problem resolution to improve the performance and availability of business services. Your team gains valuable insights into networks, applications, and servers. All in all, Riverbed solutions address all of the factors of accelerated data delivery, productivity, and scalability at a reduced infrastructure cost.
Improve Employee Productivity
Speed applications, raise productivity, and eliminate the impact of distance between remote offices, mobile workers, the data center, and business headquarters.
- Improve the performance of many of the most commonly used applications across the network, typically by 5-50 times and in some cases by up to 100 times.
- Accelerate operations by reducing the time required to complete repetitive operations.
- Ensure fast, reliable access to data and applications for employees around the globe; achieve LAN-like performance for mobile employees, no matter where they are; promote real-time collaboration, enable distributed collaboration and outsourcing, and streamline communications.
- Transfer data faster and complete transactions in record speeds, even in remote locations.
- Free up employees to spend more time with the customer and less time on the computer.
Improve Inter-Office Collaboration
Deliver strategic value to the company while helping your employees contribute and collaborate globally, anywhere, anytime.
- Faster application response times improve inter-office collaboration and industry competitiveness.
- Physical location is no longer a limitation; anyone can work on any project from anywhere.
- Work with large-size files in a distributed manner on wide-area networks.
- Reduce product development times and quicken product-to-market times
Increased Infrastructure Agility at Reduced Costs
Give senior management visibility into the IT infrastructure. Make better business decisions that save money, resources, and efficiencies. Elevate your IT group from just providing a utility to contributing meaningfully to the business.
- Acceleration — Maximize WAN optimization in all locations where your company does business. Optimize applications, servers, and networks in the branch office, out in the field, and in primary and secondary data centers. Improve time to market, enable follow-the-sun development models, enhance workload balancing, and gain flexibility for your business.
- Analysis — Analyze whether your resources are being used best for your business. Accelerate key applications and control your resources to best suit your enterprise needs.
- Visibility — Cascade is the only network visibility solution that uses behavior-based technologies to analyze traffic, speed problem resolution, and improve the performance of business services.
- Performance — Simultaneously address bandwidth constraints, TCP behavior in high latency networks, and inefficiencies in the applications themselves; provide significant acceleration for all key applications that cross the WAN.
- Agility — Respond to changing business needs quickly, without ballooning your budget, make your IT infrastructure much more nimble, locate data centers anywhere — and move them in a fraction of the time.
Cut Costs & Realize ROI
Target investments that actually cut costs and prepare for the future. Present a strategy that delivers savings today and greater opportunity in the future.
- Cut costs today — WAN optimization reduces bandwidth upgrades for two years or more in some cases. Free up budget for the bottom line and for other critical projects. Avoid router upgrades and server refreshes, and enable greater consolidation.
- Mobility as cost-savings strategy — Using WAN optimization software for mobile users allows them to be connected to the enterprise as if they were working in an office. With that level of performance, users can work from home more frequently and reduce the burden on companies in terms of branch office operating costs and real estate investments.
- Realize ROI — WAN optimization allows your company to realize ROI on other projects. CRM, ERP, disaster recovery, and communications platforms benefit from greater performance. WAN optimization makes these new projects perform better over the WAN, accelerates user adoption, and costs less to implement.
- Prepare the business for the future — WAN optimization allows businesses to cut costs now because it's an enabling technology across the complete enterprise. A small investment now can prepare the business to grow rapidly when the time is right. New IT projects can be deployed faster. IT teams can be more responsive to business needs in good times or bad.
Technical Overview:
For most users, being out of the office generally means that they are significantly less productive. They have limited access to key data and applications, and co-workers generally accept that collaboration will be difficult. With a mobile WAN optimization solution like SteelHead Mobile, mobile workers can now have the same LAN-like access to applications and data that employees in the office have. Applications can run 5, 50, or even up to 100 times faster, increasing employee productivity and inter-office collaboration.
Riverbed goes a step further to provide a complete solution to the application performance challenge. We address bandwidth constraints, TCP's behavior in high latency networks, and inefficiencies in the applications themselves. Riverbed’s Cascade provides application-level visibility into your IT infrastructure, so you can create global controls that allow your business to deliver the performance it needs.
Enhance Mobile Worker Performance
Realize dramatic performance improvements across global workforce.
- Accelerate application performance, typically by 5-50 times and, in some cases, by up to 100 times. Get more out of the applications your business relies on every day, including file sharing, email, backup, SSL, document management systems, IT tools, SharePoint, SAP, and ERP and CRM solutions.
- Adapt fast WAN optimization technology to any individual PC, including mobile workers, temporary locations, and very small offices
- Ensure fast, reliable access to data and applications for employees around the globe
- Achieve LAN-like performance for mobile employees, no matter where they are. Drive faster performance to primary and secondary data centers for DR processes.
- Improve daily survey response times that historically take 60-90 minutes, and now take fewer than 3 minutes. Managers and employees can spend more time interacting with customers instead of waiting for files to download in the back office.
Accelerate Enterprise Applications
Accelerate applications, download files faster, and lower costs.
- Optimize applications, servers, and networks
- Accelerate performance across a broad range of applications: SSL, File Sharing, Microsoft, Microsoft Sharepoint, Database, CAD, ERP, SAP, Lotus Notes, FTP, Satellite Link, and more
- Deploy in a matter of minutes by following a virtually plug-and-play process
- Easily scale to hundreds or thousands of branch offices and mobile workers
- Eliminate need to increase bandwidth capacity, reduce bandwidth utilization by 50 percent, and increase speed of application access by up to 90 percent
- Free up bandwidth for other applications, like VoIP or Citrix, so they can perform better
- Minimize the need for expensive WAN upgrades
Gain Visibility into IT Infrastructure
Enhance visibility into your infrastructure and analyze how IT resources are being used.
- Make meaningful changes that can affect performance and availability of automated systems like traffic surges or reductions, changes in application mix, and dependency changes
- Troubleshoot faster, unplanned changes in the network environment, misconfigurations, and unauthorized applications
- Detect and alerting to any threats across the entire infrastructure
- Develop appropriate security policies and resolve security incidents faster (with the Cascade ability to go beyond port level identification of network traffic)
- Enhance visibility into all key applications that cross the WAN. Quickly identify and resolve problems, eliminate pain points, validate that problems were resolved successfully, create global controls, and optimize applications for future business needs.
- Roll out new applications and upgrades quickly and efficiently. Achieve and prove compliance more easily.
- Provide senior management with information on the IT infrastructure that can help them make better business decisions that save money, resources, and efficiencies. Elevate the IT group from just providing a utility to contributing meaningfully to the business.
- Gain visibility and analytics to go well beyond simple reporting that confirms whether the infrastructure is up and running. True optimization-oriented visibility breaks down data into a deeper understanding into how applications are performing, analytics that set alerts when anomalous performance is detected, and details on which sites can benefit most from further optimization. This type of visibility can impact many different initiatives:
- Determining the impact of application acceleration and WAN optimization
- Analyzing future IT investments in relation to business priorities
Solutions:
HTTP Stream SplittingAs enterprises grow globally, the most cost-effective way to run marketing, training, or internal communications is via video. Video solutions for the enterprise consist of two major parts: content management, which includes the recording, capturing, and storing of video; and content delivery, which as the name suggests, is making sure the video content is being delivered to the end user as efficiently as possible. Riverbed works with technology partners like Polycom and Adobe to provide a complete, end-to-end enterprise video solution for its customers. While Riverbed partners deliver products to deal with video content management, reporting and the prepositioning of video, and provisioning a logical content delivery network, Riverbed SteelHead appliances ensure the efficient delivery of live and on-demand video to users located at the branch office. One of the key use cases for video deployments in an enterprise is live video. Live video can be very useful for company earnings calls, a CEO’s live broadcast to employees, or even as a special, company-wide announcement. In the live video context, the biggest requirement to easing congestion and ensuring stability of the video is “stream-splitting.” Stream splitting is where a single stream is sent downstream from the origin to the edge (branch), where it is split into as many individual streams as there are users at that location. For example, if there are 200 users at a branch location, a single stream traverses the WAN and is split into 200 streams on the LAN, where bandwidth is not constrained. Starting with RiOS 7.0, Riverbed SteelHead appliances support native stream splitting of video delivered over HTTP, such as with applications like Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash. In addition to this stream splitting capability, Riverbed’s traditional benefits like latency-aware QoS and data de-duplication of other application traffic continue to apply towards enterprise video. |
SSL AccelerationRiverbed Accelerates SSL Encrypted TrafficRiverbed extends its award winning application acceleration capability to SSL traffic by providing end-to-end secure traffic acceleration. Prior to this breakthrough, traffic from encrypted web applications wasn't "visible" to SteelHead appliances and passed through untouched; no attempt was made to optimize or accelerate that encrypted traffic. In order to apply application acceleration and WAN optimization techniques to SSL traffic, the data and protocols must be visible, which means they must be decrypted on both sides of a WAN, yet remain encrypted while traversing all three segments of a given connection: from the server to the server-side WAN optimization appliance, between the two WAN optimization appliances across the WAN, and from the client-side WAN optimization appliance to the client. Furthermore, the management of SSL certificates and private keys must be done in the data center to maintain security. Maintains the Centralized Trust Model IT Architects Demand Riverbed has introduced an innovative, patent-pending approach to accelerating SSL traffic across the WAN. One that doesn't break the centralized trust model favored by security architects. Riverbed's solution is complementary to many existing SSL Offload solutions (see below on the differences). Despite SSL offload vendors (also known as Application Front End or AFE) describing their products as "SSL Acceleration" solutions, they are architecturally different from Riverbed's, and remain complementary. The SteelHead appliances are deployed into enterprise infrastructure and become part of the trusted environment. Traffic is then decrypted, optimized with all of RiOS's streamlining capabilities, and re-encrypted on its way from one site to another. RiOS can also re-use recent SSL sessions for increased performance. All certificates and private keys are maintained in the data center, sustaining the centralized certificate-management approach favored by enterprise IT architects. Simplified Set-up and Management of SSL Acceleration RiOS SSL acceleration is easy to setup and manage. Features include auto-discovery of SteelHead appliance SSL peers and server IP addresses, support for digital certificate domain-level wildcards, and manageability improvements for administering trust relationships. These features simplify SSL acceleration across the enterprise to enable greater scalability and reduce administrative overhead. By enabling traffic to be decrypted and re-encrypted in a safe manner, enterprises can accelerate SSL-encrypted applications without trading off security and performance. |
Microsoft Exchange AccelerationMicrosoft Exchange performs poorly on WANs — so much that large enterprises often deploy distributed Exchange servers to support their local users. However maintaining many Exchange servers is expensive and complex, and often puts critical, confidential data at risk. While most IT managers would prefer a centralized Exchange architecture, they face severe performance issues for their remote users.. By deploying Riverbed SteelHead appliances, users in remote offices can access Exchange servers in a centralized and distant data center with roughly the same responsiveness as a local mail server. Distributing SteelHead Mobile on workers' laptops can extend these benefits even further by ensuring that email is accelerated, regardless of where a user attempts to connect. Riverbed can even help you avoid the early morning WAN congestion caused by the first login of remote users. By pre-populating SteelHead appliances with users' email and attachments, there's virtually no incremental traffic when they log in first thing in the morning. Riverbed’s SDR feature also removes all redundancy from WAN traffic — including common email challenges like “reply to all”, which can plague WAN links by generating many copies of an email, and email with large attachments, in which multiple copies of the file would otherwise be sent across the WAN, bringing other applications to a halt. Application Layer Exchange Acceleration: Exchange 2010, 2007, and 2003 Riverbed was the first WAN optimization vendor to provide an application-layer protocol optimization for Exchange 2003 for both office and mobile workers, and has continued to improve the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) to bring Layer 7 optimization to Exchange 2003, 2007 and 3010. RiOS recognizes Exchange traffic in native mode and applies specific enhancements to significantly improve performance in both unencrypted and encrypted modes. Thousands of Riverbed customers have leveraged this optimization to consolidate their Microsoft Exchange servers, without sacrificing performance for end users. With RiOS 6.5, SteelHead delivers industry-first optimization for Outlook Anywhere. Riverbed has combined its ability to optimize HTTPS with new RPC optimizations to simultaneously accelerate Outlook Anywhere and reduce the application's bandwidth consumption. Users can work faster and more productively with SteelHead and Outlook Anywhere than ever before. |
Microsoft SharePointMicrosoft SharePoint allows users from around the globe to share documents and information in a collaborative environment. Although SharePoint provides a rich suite of team productivity tools, it often requires a centralized store for all business documents. As a result, users working remotely or on the road must access the portal over a wide-area network (WAN) and often suffer suboptimal performance. Riverbed optimizes Microsoft SharePoint Services to deliver LAN-like performance for remote offices by simultaneously addressing bandwidth constraints and the combined effects of latency and protocol inefficiencies. With the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), distributed SharePoint servers and complex replication models are no longer necessary for accelerated performance at any office, anywhere in the world. Because SharePoint leverages HTTP as a web-based portal, RiOS provides even more acceleration for portal applications through several different HTTP optimizations. Advanced features like URL-learning, parse and pre-fetch, and an object pre-fetch table for complete web objects deliver enhanced application performance. These benefits, combined with a deep application level understanding of SharePoint traffic, ensure that users get the best performance regardless of location, further protecting their investment in the solution. Riverbed also accelerates SSL traffic, so organizations who run SharePoint via HTTPS can still achieve LAN-like performance without compromising their security. |
Lotus Notes AccelerationLotus Notes has been a distributed application since its inception, and works well in most cases. However, the nature of Notes' constant and thorough database replication generates a tremendous amount of WAN traffic for remote users. Although the Notes application protocol is fairly efficient, the behavior of TCP combined with the high traffic causes the replication to slow down to a crawl in low-bandwidth, high-latency environments. SteelHead appliances and SteelHead Mobile can be used to improve access to centralized Notes servers, or to dramatically reduce the time to update or back up your Notes database. Riverbed’s SDR technology eliminates all the repetitive bytes sent over the WAN. It also mitigates the effects of TCP slowdowns. Riverbed was the first WAN optimization vendor to provide an application-layer protocol optimization for Lotus Notes for both office and mobile workers, and it has continued to improve the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) to bring Layer 7 optimization to Notes and Domino. The result is even better performance improvements for the sending of large email attachments with a performance gain of eight to 25 times. Riverbed also optimizes server-to-server replication, calendaring, and more. RiOS transparently switches off transport compression so Notes/Domino traffic for all applications can be more effectively optimized by the SteelHead appliance and SteelHead Mobile. |
Database Application AccelerationFor large and complex deployments, many applications like Microsoft Project rely on database back-ends like MS-SQL. However, like Exchange and Windows, MS-SQL relies on its own application-level protocol (Tabular Data Stream or TDS) that rides on top of TCP. The chatty nature of the TDS protocol can limit the performance of your application, no matter how much bandwidth is available. With Riverbed’s optional MS-SQL latency module, many applications that rely on MS-SQL will run faster over your current WAN infrastructure. This enables you to roll out your current applications more successfully and completely. Some other database applications, such as Oracle 11i and 12 E-Business Suites, are usually accessed as web-based applications. These HTTP and HTTPS connections can also be accelerated, and Riverbed supports both SunJRE and JInitiator for the Oracle Forms Java virtual machine, delivering high performance for end users anywhere. |
FTP AccelerationFile Transfer Protocol (FTP) is widely used by many companies as a mechanism for transferring large files. One of the primary reasons FTP is used instead of Windows file shares is that FTP is not subject to the delays caused by CIFS — the application protocol used by Windows file sharing. However, even though FTP over TCP performs better than CIFS over TCP, the throughput is still too slow when latency gets high or when bandwidth is limited, or both. Riverbed SteelHead appliances and SteelHead Mobile software can accelerate typical large file shares over FTP from five- to 100-fold, depending on the file size, network conditions, and the workload generated by the data. With SteelHead appliances, many companies find that they can use the simpler Windows file sharing method instead of FTP. SteelHead appliances also eliminate the need for specialized file transfer protocols (such as BBFTP) in an effort to deliver higher throughput than FTP. Whether you rely on FTP or Windows file sharing, SteelHead appliances will radically improve the throughput of your WAN. |
CAD Application AccelerationCAD and CAE applications, including Autodesk’s AutoCAD, Land Desktop, and Inventor; PTC’s Pro/E; Dassault Systems’ CATIA or SolidWorks; and Bentley’s Microstation, generate enormous files that are extremely difficult to work with over WANs. The most common solution is to maintain a file vault in each site, along with some kind of revision control process or application. By deploying SteelHead appliances or SteelHead Mobile, designers and engineers can collaborate across long distances as if they were in the same room, sharing enormous CAD files with ease. Whether users exchange CAD files via FTP, email, or remote-file shares, SteelHead appliances can radically improve the speed with which those files move over a WAN. For large files sent over low-bandwidth/high latency links, the gains in performance can easily approach five to 50 times, and in some cases up to 100 times |
In-House or Custom App AccelerationMost large enterprises have many custom or in-house applications that have been written over many years. Generally, those applications were written by people in a lab or office connected to servers through the LAN. When the application is rolled out to remote offices that are connected over high-latency, low-bandwidth WAN links, the application that worked so well in the home office can break down completely. Sometimes the degradation in performance is caused by a lack of bandwidth, sometimes by the way TCP affects the application, and sometimes by the application itself. Depending on the cause of the problem, SteelHead appliances can make a big difference in the performance of the application. If the primary cause of the slowdown turns out to be either lack of bandwidth or the effects of TCP, then SteelHead appliances can make a significant difference. If however the cause turns out to be the application or the application protocol, then custom tuning or a separate latency module to address the application protocol would be required in order to create a significant increase in performance. |
ERP and CRM AccelerationApplications like Siebel, SAP, Oracle, and other mission-critical ERP and CRM applications suffer when accessed over a WAN. Whether users rely on a proprietary fat client or a web client deployment, the responsiveness of an application for someone in a remote office is often far worse than for a user at headquarters. Deploying SteelHead appliances can improve the responsiveness for many ERP and CRM applications by two- to 10-fold, and in many cases far more. This is often enough to allow a more universal rollout of key applications, rather than letting poor user acceptance stall deployments. The degree of performance improvement depends on the client being used, the application involved, the underlying protocols being used, and the basic WAN configuration. The Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) has features that further optimize web traffic, like URL-learning, parse and pre-fetch, and an object pre-fetch table for complete web objects to deliver enhanced application delivery. The major benefit is even better performance for enterprise web applications such as ERP and CRM. |
SAP AccelerationThe SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) applications provide world-class planning and business integration capabilities for operations, financials, product development, human capital management, and corporate services. The application suites provide a range of streamlined integration and automation for operations such as procurement, logistics, and product development to financial transaction processing and reporting functions. Deploying Riverbed into SAP environments can yield a two- to 10-fold improvement in application response times. As more SAP environments leverage a web service or SOA foundation through SAP NetWeaver, Riverbed can provide significant benefits for XML, HTTP, and HTTPS traffic. Riverbed has also received SAP Certified Integration status for RiOS. SAP brought SteelHead appliances into their Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) and specifically tested Riverbed's technology for interoperability. SAP NetWeaver Acceleration SAP NetWeaver is a web-based, open integration and application platform that organizations can use to align information and business processes across the enterprise. It serves as the foundation for enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) and utilizes open standards to enable information integration from almost any source. While the solution provides a robust platform for aligning IT infrastructure with business objectives, globally distributed environments may experience slow performance over the WAN. SteelHead appliances have received SAP-certified integration and can help accelerate SAP NetWeaver applications running over the WAN. For forward-looking companies that are seeking to adopt SOA, Riverbed can help organizations achieve global scalability, while significantly slashing the time required to perform SAP operations. Deploying Riverbed on networks running SAP NetWeaver produces significant benefits, including:
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Satellite Link AccelerationSatellites are used in areas where land lines are either unavailable, too expensive, or are unable to deliver the required bandwidth. While it’s possible to get significant bandwidth from a satellite-based link at a significant cost, they suffer from extremely high latency due to the distance from earth to the satellite and back. Typical round-trip times (RTT) for a cross-country or trans-oceanic, land-based WAN link range from 100 to 200 ms, while a satellite link can easily take up to a full second. This huge RTT causes massive delays, especially with application protocols like CIFS, MAPI, and TCP itself. If your company relies on satellite links to deliver data, SteelHead appliances and SteelHead Mobile could make a huge difference in your current application performance, as well as which applications you try to run over those links. Many companies are unable to roll out Exchange or Windows file sharing to satellite-linked sites because of the extremely high latency. With SteelHead appliances, those sites can enjoy performance similar to local offices connected through the LAN. |
Accelerate Other Applications:
Riverbed SteelHead appliances can optimize a wide range of applications. While we cannot describe the exact degree of application acceleration for all applications under all conditions, here are a few of the applications that SteelHead appliances can accelerate.
Check with your sales engineer for the latest information on your application. If you don’t see your application listed here, contact Riverbed for more information.
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