Consolidation and virtualization are hot trends in IT, helping businesses increase their flexibility and efficiency in delivering valuable services while reducing costs. The enhanced Riverbed® Services Platform (RSP) provides customers with the capability to run up to five additional services and applications virtually on VMware in a protected partition on the Steelhead® appliance. This revolutionary approach allows customers to deploy local services in all their branch offices without the need to deploy and maintain full-blown servers to run the applications. The business benefits are minimizing the hardware needed at the branch office, enabling companies to consolidate IT operations even further, reducing costs, and simplifying administration, all while still delivering essential local services.

IT Consolidation at the Edge

Organizations have widely implemented IT infrastructure consolidation measures to reap many of the well-known benefits: simplified management, lower costs, and improved data protection and resource utilization. Despite these efforts, there are still services that must be delivered locally.

Local print, DNS, and DHCP are good examples of these type of "edge" services that defy many central consolidation efforts. The RSP now allows organizations to run these services on the Steelhead appliance, so organizations can eliminate these now redundant servers to further reduce hardware, software, and maintenance costs and IT complexity.

Game-changing Architecture

The RSP is uniquely suited to branch office server consolidation and virtualization. First, the Steelhead appliance is the only wide area network (WAN) optimization device to run industry-leading technology from VMware as the virtualization platform, taking advantage of the skills companies already have in house. Virtual servers run in a protected zone and do not impact the resources needed for peak Steelhead appliance operations. The RSP also enables customers to run up to five different virtual machines at once, eliminating many more servers from the branch office. And, the RSP runs on most Steelhead appliance models, enabling customers to benefit without having to replace their previous investments in Riverbed. The RSP has advanced network rules capabilities, guaranteeing that data travels in and out from the LAN or WAN in a fashion that matches the nature of the application being served. Benefiting from the Riverbed Technology Alliance (RTA), the RSP also supports tested applications from a wide variety of category leading products, as well as any VMware virtual machine.

RTA partners with software that can be run on the RSP:

Run Windows Server 2003 or 2008 for DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, print serving, streaming media, or file serving. Visit the Windows Server website.

Run Live ACE for application performance management including monitoring, measurement, and detection of performance violations. Get complete visibility and reporting of all transactions and users, with detailed real-time and historical information about end-user response times, utilization, route quality, and ISP performance. Read the solution brief or visit the OPNET website.

Run consolidated core network services – including DNS, DHCP, IPAM, RADIUS, TFTP, NTP and others – that are critical to the operation of all IP-based networks. Read the solution brief or visit the INFOBLOX website.

Run a complete video communications solution that captures and manages live and on-demand video, distributes Flash and Windows Media formats, and reduces the impact of video bandwidth consumption on your network. Read the solution brief Link to attached visit the QUMU website.

Run a Flash streaming media server that features an innovative server architecture that delivers unmatched performance, functionality, and scalability for efficient delivery of live and on-demand streaming video. Read the solution brief or visit the Wowza website.

Achieve greater application performance across satellite wide area networks (WANs) while maintaining SCPS (Space Communication Protocol Standards) interoperability. Visit the Global Protocols website.

Run NetX software service to monitor and analyze the performance, user experience and delivery of critical business applications, as well as the general performance of the WAN. Visit the NetDialog website.