Riverbed Joins Network Appliance™ Partner Program; Riverbed Works With NetApp to Help Customers Accelerate Their Disaster Recovery and Replication Solutions by up to 45X over Wide Area Networks

Business Wire, August 21, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO -- Riverbed Technology, Inc., today announced that it has joined the NetApp(R) Partner Program. The program enables partners to rapidly deploy support for NetApp enterprise-ready storage and data protection solutions. As a member of the NetApp Partner Program, Riverbed(R) will provide NetApp and Riverbed Steelhead(R) appliance customers with the ability to accelerate their disaster recovery and remote replication solutions, by improving the NetApp SnapMirror(R) data transfer rate by up to 45X, helping them to better meet their recovery point objectives.

Riverbed's Steelhead appliances provide companies that share data and collaborate between distributed offices significant performance improvements for a broad range of applications that are important to their businesses, offering these companies the ability to simplify IT infrastructure and realize significant capital and operational cost savings.

"NetApp provides customers that are protecting their data -- as well as managing those processes -- with unmatched simplicity at a lower TCO," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of products and alliances at Network Appliance. "Companies need optimization solutions that will help them to cost-effectively meet their recovery point objectives in the event of a disaster, and minimize the amount of data lost during a disaster. Riverbed's membership in the NetApp Partner Program means that customers can benefit from improved disaster recovery and remote replication in NetApp enterprise storage environments."

"Timely data replication and backup are critical for business continuity," said Eric Wolford, senior vice president, marketing and business development at Riverbed. "Customers and partners concerned about disaster recovery and regulatory compliance have seen tremendous value working with Riverbed and NetApp to replicate files over the WAN."

"We are both a NetApp and Riverbed reseller," said Hayes Drumwright, president of Trace3, an Irvine, Calif.-based solution provider. "Our clients look to us for solutions that both save them money and improve business processes and performance. The combination of NetApp and Riverbed offers our clients unmatched utilization of both WAN and storage resources. We have seen upwards of 45x improvements in mirroring and disaster recovery solutions."

Riverbed and Network Appliance are committed to providing customers with the highest-performance and most complete business continuance solutions for accelerating disaster recovery.

"Our network generates up to 50 Gigabytes (GB) of updates per day with our active Oracle and SAP applications," said Henry Grant, director of IT at Amkor Technology. "Replicating that data to an offsite data center is a key part of our disaster recovery plans. We deployed NetApp storage systems running SnapMirror software to help facilitate the replication process. However, before installing Riverbed's Steelhead appliances, our network limited us to sending 14 GB of traffic per day. It was impossible to keep our disaster recovery storage system synchronized. After the installation of Riverbed's Steelhead appliances, we are now able to do near real-time replication with SnapMirror. In the event of a failure, the disaster recovery data will be a maximum of one hour behind our active Oracle and SAP data. Riverbed has reduced our SnapMirror traffic by 85%."

"We replicate over five gigabytes (GB) of data every night over the WAN using SnapMirror," said Brian Crooker, MIS manager at William Hezmalhalch Architects. "Before we installed Riverbed's Steelhead appliances, moving that data from our remote sites to the data center took almost 24 hours. WAN constraints made the process unworkable. With the Steelhead appliances deployed, these same transfers now take less than three hours. Riverbed has accelerated our SnapMirror data transfer rate by 8X."

About Steelhead Appliances

Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead appliances accelerate enterprise applications typically by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times between enterprise datacenters and remote offices. The Steelhead appliance's intelligent optimizations give companies that share data and collaborate between distributed offices significant performance improvements for a broad range of applications that are important to their businesses, offering these companies the ability to simplify IT infrastructure and realize significant capital and operational cost savings.

Unlike competing approaches that are built primarily on either a network-compression or storage (caching) philosophy (like many WAFS-only architectures), Steelhead appliances are based on the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS(TM)) that accelerates all TCP-based applications, including common applications like Windows file sharing, MAPI, Microsoft SQL and DPM, NetApp SnapMirror, Symantec's NetBackup and FTP, while adding incremental application-specific latency optimizations to minimize the impact of latency on key applications.

Riverbed's intelligent optimizations also enable remote office IT consolidation, WAN bandwidth optimization and acceleration of data replication and backup for disaster recovery.