Riverbed Steelhead 7050 model WAN optimisation appliance

Riverbed Technology has announced the Riverbed Steelhead 7050 model wide area network (WAN) optimisation appliance for performance, flexibility and fault tolerance in large data centres and private cloud environments.

The appliance combines new levels of bandwidth and TCP session scalability with solid-state drives (SSD) and 10GbE.

It efficiently scales to meet performance, reliability and flexibility requirements of large enterprises and allows them to more cost-effectively manage large-scale data centre-to-data centre replication, accelerate applications among many locations and users in an enterprise and build large private cloud infrastructures.

It is claimed to be the first WAN optimisation appliance where the persistent data store is 100% resident on solid-state drives (SSDs), minimising disk access times and latency to allow it to deliver the speed necessary to handle extreme work loads.

It optimises up to 100,000 concurrent optimised TCP connections and up to 1 Gbps WAN-side throughput, and utilises up to four 10GbE network interface cards.

The appliance comes equipped with up to 28 SSDs that allow for higher throughput for read, write and search performance. Its data reduction capabilities free up more bandwidth for business-critical applications, which is said to reduce WAN traffic as much as 60-95%.

SSDs in the appliances are leveraged for datastore fault tolerance so that if one of the SSDs fails, the appliance maintains high throughput and continues to optimise data using the remaining disks.

The appliance is said to provide the highest WAN capacity in the industry. It can support up to four 10GbE SR cards and is equipped to handle up to 100,000 connections.

The Steelhead 7050L optimises up to 75,000 concurrent TCP connections and is equipped with 14 SSDs. It optimises up to 100,000 concurrent TCP connections and is equipped with 28 SSDs.