Riverbed Technology RiOS 6.1 WAN optimisation system

Riverbed Technology has released the RiOS 6.1 WAN optimisation system to support private and public cloud computing, IT centralisation and disaster recovery.

It is claimed to accelerate the pathway to the cloud for users by providing enhanced acceleration for cloud services and enterprise applications, providing users with more flexibility when determining the best approach for consolidating IT resources to public, private and hybrid cloud environments and maximising performance regardless of network architecture.

The system features optimisations for Lotus Notes 8.5 and a range of Microsoft suites including Exchange 2010, SharePoint and Online for SharePoint and Exchange. It also has enhanced optimisations for disaster recovery (DR) performance, providing storage networking protocol enhancements to improve performance, scale and management for enterprises with large data centre environments.

This version is claimed to deliver latency optimisation and data reduction improvements for both encrypted and unencrypted Exchange 2010 traffic, enabling data reduction up to 95%.

Further SharePoint optimisations eliminate many of the performance issues encountered by remote users. It accelerates traffic at both the network layer and application layer and eliminates unnecessary round trips associated with SharePoint authentication requests, enabling Steelhead appliances to deliver enhanced SharePoint optimisation and reduce application latency and response times by up to 50% more than previously.

For users looking to accelerate replication traffic over the WAN, it delivers enhanced storage optimisations for DR initiatives by reducing DR traffic and accelerating replication times between data centres.

Users of EMC Symmetrix VMAX and Symmetrix DMX will benefit from improved data reduction and throughput due to EMC SRDF optimisation and an auto-negotiate compression feature for EMC SRDF enables simplified management and increased availability.

This version provides storage networking optimisations for FCIP traffic over Brocade 7500 and Cisco MDS gateways, speeding FCIP traffic to and across the network on both a protocol and a network level.

Riverbed is claimed to be the first and only WAN optimisation vendor to deliver both network and application-layer optimisations for large-scale replication, enabling good levels of data reduction and throughput.