Riverbed Technology Steelhead and Cloud Steelhead enhancements

Riverbed Technology has announced that Steelhead wide area network (WAN) optimisation solutions have enhanced support for Citrix XenDesktop virtual desktop solutions and Cloud Steelhead has added compatibility with ESX-based public cloud services.

Steelhead enhances virtual desktop deployments by optimising traffic for a full range of solutions, including Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, VMware View, and Microsoft RDP and RemoteFX, enabling users to overcome the performance barriers to delivering desktop virtualisation over the WAN.

The enhanced optimisation for Citrix XenDesktop is in addition to the optimisation that the company already provides for XenApp, offering up to 60% bandwidth reduction for Citrix ICA traffic when compared to uncompressed Citrix traffic. The Riverbed solution also offers simplified configuration for Citrix optimisations, enabling users to easily deploy and manage accelerated Citrix environments. Additionally, the fine-grained QoS controls available in the Steelhead appliance enable users to control virtual desktop streams and prioritise latency-sensitive traffic without overprovisioning bandwidth, which allows users to successfully deploy virtual desktops without adding bandwidth or impacting the performance of other applications running on the network.

With its enhanced capabilities, Cloud Steelhead is designed to easily install and scale within public cloud service provider environments, improving performance for applications hosted within the cloud as well as accelerating data migration to the cloud. Cloud Steelhead users are said to have experienced up to 30x improvement in application performance and up to 98% data reduction.

With the expansion of its cloud service provider ecosystem, the company offers users greater flexibility in choosing cloud service providers. Cloud Steelhead provides validated technical compatibility with a number of cloud service providers, including Terremark, ZettaServe and Xtium, as well as solution technology partners CloudSwitch and Media Platform, joining Amazon EC2 and VPC. Cloud Steelhead enables service providers to ensure enterprise-class performance for customers, enabling them to build differentiated service offerings for organisations looking to leverage the benefits of the cloud.