Performance optimisation vendor Riverbed Software hosted an event by the Hudson River in New York City this week to announce its product direction for the Cloud.
Riverbed announced Virtual Steelhead for the Cloud, its virtual optimisation appliance for the public Cloud, and also trailed the benefits of swifter Cloud storage. "Riverbed's new virtual Steelhead for the Cloud will be an important piece for Cloud computing architectures," said Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president, Yankee Group. "The new solutions promise to overcome performance challenges, one of the key barriers to widespread Cloud adoption."
Riverbed, whose products accelerate the movement of networked data, believes that the trend is towards enterprises shifting applications and storage to the public Cloud and away from purely private Clouds. For many organisations, latency and slow, “chatty” network protocols can be costly and time-consuming, especially where the wide area network (WAN) might stretch across countries or continents. Riverbed's products aim to strip away some of that complexity and speed up the exchange of data between networked devices, with the aim of making a WAN behave more like a local area network (LAN) or storage area network (SAN), said host Eric Wolford, Riverbed senior VP, marketing and business development.
"For over five years we've delivered the market-leading solution for WAN optimisation that overcomes the performance barrier to successfully consolidating IT infrastructure into private Clouds. These same performance issues also affect enterprises as they move to public Clouds,” said Wolford.
Peering through the Cloud
On stage at the event were representatives from Amazon Web Services, AT&T, BT Global Services, IBM, agri-business giant Lantmännen, and Orange Business Services, all of whom extolled the virtues of a hybrid of private and public Cloud services.
Nordic agri-business giant Lantmännen has what it claims is the largest private enterprise Cloud in the world: 5,000 applications provided to over 300 sites in 20 countries, according to Dennis Jansson, its chief security officer. “Our Cloud is not a web service, it's delivered through a private Cloud to control OpEx and CapEx and to enable an agile, secure, and controlled IS/IT strategy.”
The company relies on Riverbed to ensure high performance over its private Cloud infrastructure – something that would not be possible without WAN optimisation, he said.
"We are consolidating thousands of servers from hundreds of branch offices into two virtualised data centres,” he said. “We selected Riverbed to ensure performance as we centralise applications, consolidate local servers and defer telecom spending across hundreds of sites. We expect to cut $6.5 million in overall IT infrastructure costs in one year.”
Jansson added that ROI was visible within 12 months and that the company expects to save £60 million in IT costs by year five. “We've crushed costs by maintaining high performance,” he said.
Each of the Riverbed customers speaking at the event had a different perspective on what the Cloud meant, and what the key issues were facing businesses in their move to Cloud services and infrastructures. For Lantmännen's Jansson the key issue of the Cloud is packaging spare capacity in the network, which can then be bought and sold on demand.
IBM's Meg Selfe, GTS VP of sales Cloud Computing for North America, said the main challenge for business is the proliferation of “trillions of networked devices”, communication between which needs to be optimised to avoid what she called “a crisis... it's not sustainable. We have to do things smarter to fuel the growth of the business.” For her, the other main impetus behind enterprises moving to the Cloud is saving money, while also accelerating time to value.
Communications was the sector most strongly represented on the Riverbed event stage. Scott Cain, head of infrastructure optimisation for BT Global Services said that the creation of a virtual private infrastructure was a key component of BT's plans, and that companies such as Riverbed were at the heart of it. Joe Weinman, VP of strategy and business development at rival AT&T said that the trend within Cloud computing has been from appliances to virtualisation and, now, to pure software: “Without optimisation, no one is going to hardwire this stuff anymore. The architecture we're heading towards is an enterprise data centre coupled with Cloud services.”
Reporting by Chris Middleton in New York
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