Riverbed WDS Solutions Deliver LAN-Like Performance Over Wide-Area Networks for VMware Environments

Business Wire, Sept 10, 2007

Riverbed's Award-Winning Steelhead[R] Appliances Allow Global and Regional Enterprises to Virtualize Data Access and Accelerate Collaboration Across Time Zones and Borders While Ensuring Business Continuity and Optimal Utilization of IT Resources

SAN FRANCISCO -- Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:RVBD), the performance leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that its industry-leading Steelhead appliances now enable enterprises to efficiently collaborate across VMware environments, while at the same time centralizing and consolidating IT resources - all without sacrificing application performance. Joint Riverbed[R] and VMware customers can now more efficiently replicate VMware environments to set up remote and branch offices backed by disaster recovery, all while experiencing performance improvements of up to 55x.

As a Premier Partner in the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program, Riverbed is able to assure customers of interoperability between VMware's virtualization solutions and Riverbed's Steelhead WDS products. Riverbed is scheduled to speak about the WDS offering at VMworld 2007, September 11-13, 2007 in San Francisco in a one-hour session, BC39, titled, "Optimizing Data Protection for Virtual Environments with Deduplication and WAN Acceleration." To learn more about the event, please visit www.vmworld.com.

Enterprise customers have already recognized the value of the Riverbed and VMware offering. When asked about the solution, Mandi Turner, director of information technology at Greenebaum, Doll & McDonald, a US-based business law firm with approximately 200 legal professionals in seven offices, serving local, national and international clients, commented, "The VMware and Riverbed solution delivers multiple benefits. First, they have allowed us to consolidate our IT. We've eliminated 66% of our servers, yet our remote staff is able to work as if they are local. Second, we're now able to accelerate our virtualized data for disaster recovery by nine times. File transfers that once took six hours now take 20 minutes. Lastly, our WAN capacity has increased an average by 2.5X. Without the combination of these two products, we wouldn't have been able to deploy this project."

Cubist Pharmaceuticals, a rapidly growing biopharmaceutical firm that focuses on the development of anti-infective drugs, replicates VMware virtual machine images as part of a next generation disaster recovery strategy and has deployed Riverbed's WDS solutions to accelerate that replication.

Michael Geldart, senior manager of computer operations at Cubist, described his VMware implementation as follows, "We're an early adopter and heavy user of newer enabling technologies, VMware being one of those. Two years ago, we embarked upon utilization of VMware Infrastructure as our primary virtualization platform. We now have roughly 90% of our Windows and Linux servers running inside of VMware ESX Server as a virtual machine, which allows us to do a snap of these machines and replicate them to other sites."

When asked to describe the benefits of the Riverbed solution, Geldart stated, "The Steelhead products have given us unbelievable performance when replicating VMware virtual machines. For some of the common VMware snaps that we do on a regular basis, we now see upwards of 50 to 55x improvement in data transfer for a snap of a VMware machine, which is just incredible."

"VMware is a premier provider of virtualization solutions, while Riverbed is the leader in WDS," said Eric Wolford, senior vice president, marketing and business development at Riverbed. "Customers who deploy our solutions get additional economic benefits: ease of deployment and reduced cost of virtualized infrastructure in addition to the regular day-to-day performance benefits for remote users provided by Riverbed's WDS. And, with the release of Steelhead Mobile, we have the potential to extend deeper into virtualized environments."

Riverbed's WDS solutions enable organizations with more than one office to overcome a host of severe problems, including poor application performance and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. By speeding the performance of applications between distributed sites by five to 50 times - and in some cases up to 100 times - Riverbed improves backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, and improves staff productivity and collaboration. Steelhead appliances have been deployed in organizations ranging from the world's largest corporations with offices around the globe to small companies with a couple of sites that are just miles apart. To learn more, view Riverbed's demo: www.riverbed.com/pr/jack.> Solutions providers around the globe are working closely with enterprise customers to realize the value of deploying both Riverbed and VMware products. Michael Paynter, managing partner of Tier 3 Technology, a Kentucky-based consulting and services company specializing in project management, business continuity planning, virtualization and WAN application acceleration, described how his firm is working with VMware and Riverbed, "We've built a business continuity and disaster recovery offering based on VMware Infrastructure 3 and Riverbed's WDS solutions called the 'Everready Services Platform.' The offering allows us to meet our customers' deployment, cost and performance objectives for ensuring data integrity and continuous operations, while delivering the added benefit of LAN-like application performance to users at remote sites."