New Features in the Riverbed® Optimization System (RiOS™) v5.5
RiOS 5.5 introduces enhancements to the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), optimizes Lotus Notes and encrypted MAPI, and adds business continuity features and SMB Signing support. All of these improvements increase Riverbed's technology leadership position in Wide Area Data Services (WDS).
SPEED
Lotus Notes Optimization improves the sending of large email attachments with a performance gain of 8X to 25X. This release also optimizes server-to-server replication, calendaring, and more. RiOS 5.5 transparently switches off transport compression so Notes/Domino traffic for all applications can be more effectively optimized by the Steelhead appliance.
Encrypted MAPI Support allows Steelhead® appliances to operate in secure customer environments where email encryption is used (often by default) between the client and host servers without impacting security. Performance is now improved as much as for unencrypted email, up to 54X.
Business Continuity Improvements enable Steelhead appliances to scale for high-throughput disaster recovery environments, with up to Gigabit LAN-side throughput and at least 5x data reduction. These enhancements enable acceleration of asynchronous replication solutions such as EMC SRDF/A, CA XOsoft, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, and more.
SMB Signing Support allows customers who serve files from domain controllers where Microsoft's SMB signing is set to required by default to protect themselves from "man in the middle" attacks. This feature gives support for CIFS latency optimizations in the presence of signed packets.
SCALABILITY
Top Talkers Reporting allows network administrators to report on the top users of bandwidth, either for security monitoring or accounting purposes. The flows that are generating the heaviest use of WAN bandwidth are known as the Top Talkers. This feature gives them back more LAN and WAN visibility without having to use the WAN transparency feature or NetFlow.
Microsoft Office OpLock Optimization means latency optimizations now remain enabled for all users even in times of contention for the same file. This optimization improves access times specifically for Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel files.
SIMPLICITY
RSP Improvements offer customers support for local packages like streaming media, security, and Active Directory, as well as the capacity to run Windows inside of the RSP on their Steelhead appliances. Customers can run up to five instances with RSP now that VMware is the new RSP virtualization platform.
