How the Data Center Will Grow Up in Three Years
Riverbed Technology today extended the level of control IT organizations can gain over wide area networks (WAN) by incorporating a policy engine into its line of SteelHead WAN optimization appliances.
The upgrade was announced today at the Riverbed FORCE 2014 conference. Amol Kabe, vice president of product management for Riverbed, says Riverbed SteelHead 9.0 now allows IT organizations to define the class of WAN links they should use based on the performance requirements of applications.
Kabe says it’s now routine for IT organizations to deploy a mix of Internet and private leased lines in support of cloud applications. As such, they need WAN appliances that can dynamically route application traffic across those WAN links based on latency requirements.
To provide more visibility into those requirements, Riverbed has also integrated SteelHead 9.0 with the latest version of Riverbed SteelCentral, which provides a central repository for troubleshooting application performance issues. Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse 9.5 adds new visibility into the end-user experience in addition to identifying whether service delays are occurring on the network because of issues with the service provider or the networking equipment installed on premise.
As cloud computing becomes more of a hybrid, so too does the networking environment that enables it. Management of those different classes of networks is becoming increasingly complex. Rather than spending an inordinate amount of time troubleshooting those networks, the time has come to rely more on policies that automate which application traffic should run where and when. Otherwise, IT organizations are left studying network diagrams that do little to inform them of what is really occurring on the WAN links as it actually pertains their applications.
