'WAN Optimisation Can Drive Critical Projects During Recession'

As per a recent Gartner report, WAN optimisation is one of the four technologies worth considering for mid-market segments. In 2008, the WAN optimisation appliance market crossed the $1 billion mark for the first time. Vivek Singh, regional director, India/ SAARC, Riverbed Technology, talks to Biztech2.0 about WAN optimisation trends and the company’s product Steelhead Mobile 2.0.

Can you please elaborate on Steelhead Mobile and Steelhead Mobile 2.0?

As enterprises are getting increasingly distributed and more and more workers are becoming mobile, network connectivity is becoming an issue. With simple software installed in their laptops, Steelhead Mobile enterprises can give mobile workers LAN-like access to corporate files and applications, no matter where they are. Steelhead Mobile offers a solution to the challenges of location and link by maximising bandwidth. It eliminates redundant data from crossing the network and streamlining the transportation and application layers. The result is smooth access without any connectivity hassles.
Installing the Steelhead Mobile software does not require the IT manager to undertake any major reshuffling related to the IT infrastructure of the organisation. IT managers can control the Steelhead Mobile software whether or not end-users see anything at all (like the Steelhead Mobile system tray icon), and they can even make Steelhead Mobile completely invisible to end users if the situation so demands.

Software is pushed out to end-user machines via MSI packages. Using the Steelhead Mobile Controller (SMC), IT administrators control the installation process as well as the configuration policies that determine what optimisations take place per user or per group of users.

What is the Steelhead market like in India and which segments do you mainly target?

Riverbed finds great potential in the Indian market. Riverbed’s India operations began in the year 2005. Riverbed’s expansion into India is a response to strong customer and partner demand, as organisations recognise the importance of optimising wide area network (WAN) performance for a broad range of applications and services, including IT consolidation, backup and disaster recovery, and application acceleration.

For Riverbed, any organisation having more than one branch is a potential customer. The reason being, an organisation having multiple branch offices is plagued by connectivity issues over the WAN (Wide Area Network). And today, companies are becoming increasingly distributed, thereby finding the need to have such a solution.

How can CIOs utilise Steelhead appliances to reduce cost in the current scenario?

As WAN optimisation enhances the performance of applications over the enterprise network, it helps to realise considerable cost savings in addition to productivity improvements. IDC found that the average payback period for a Riverbed implementation is 7.3 months (IDC Whitepaper, ‘Adding Business Value with Wide-area Data Services,’ August 2007).

Riverbed’s WAN optimisation solutions can cut costs by helping organisations do the following:

Reduce bandwidth costs: Using Riverbed to improve network performance, many organisations can defer WAN bandwidth upgrades. WAN optimisation projects can often be justified solely on bandwidth savings.

Consolidate infrastructure into the data centre: With WAN optimisation, enterprises can remove much of the IT infrastructure (such as file and e-mail servers, SMS servers, SharePoint servers, tape auto-loaders, and so forth) that sit in branch offices—without impacting performance.

Simplify branch office infrastructure: Riverbed offers the RiOS Services Platform (RSP), which enables customers to run best-of-breed services on the Steelhead appliance (such as print, IP address management, and other services). This allows customers to consolidate their IT even further, making a true ‘serverless’ branch office a reality.

Optimise disaster recovery: By improving the performance of a disaster recovery site, WAN optimisation can help organisations save money and back up their data in a more frequent and reliable manner.

What are the current trends in the WAN optimisation market?

WAN optimisation is fast becoming a mainstream technology with rapid adoption. Cost optimisation is the need of the hour within enterprises and customers are deploying WAN optimisation and application optimisation to drive critical projects such as:

A. Consolidation of servers and applications in DC
B. Remote office acceleration and mobile acceleration directly from laptops
C. Virtualisation initiatives and
D. Site-to-site replications in Data Centres

What new technologies are driving this market?

WAN optimisation is not only reduction of data traffic over WAN. The technology that is seeing rapid adoption goes much beyond data reduction over WAN. Comprehensive performance improvement over WAN comes from new technology such as latency-specific optimisation and application-specific optimization, which is clearly a differentiator for Riverbed. WAN optimization deployment should be seamless across an appliance and also across laptop/ desktop solutions for the mobile workforce and very small remote offices.