ANTenna Blog -- Storage

Wringing every last drop of performance from the network is vital to any business, particularly growing businesses without big bucks for infrastructure upgrades. Getting the most from what you have is the appeal of network optimization -- a new appliance from Riverbed dangles the promise of not only bandwidth efficiency, but also reduced server and storage costs.

With Steelhead, Riverbed is well established in the WAN optimization space. Now with the introduction of Atlas, the company is reaching into the de-duplication space, but with the goal of taking on established storage providers.

Atlas de-dupes data. Sounds like a straightforward storage play, right? Not quite. Though the storage market may be Riverbed's destination, the journey is more important -- specifically the journey the data takes across the network. Many de-dupe storage solutions focus on de-duping as part of the storage equation to reduce the volume of storage needed. Riverbed's moving upstream to de-dupe on the network itself -- only unique bytes go over the network. That, in turn, enhances network performance by maximizing bandwidth and potentially reduces the need for servers and storage. Less duplication means less data and less data means less need for compute power and storage and less compute power and storage means less expense and (you get the idea)…

Riverbed's tagline for this strategy is "changing the nature of data," a marketing slogan with visionary overtones. A more pragmatic analogy comes courtesy of Alan Saldich, Riverbed's VP of product marketing and alliances, who said, "We're like BASF, we don't make a lot of the products you buy, we make a lot of the products you buy, better." His point being that de-duplication at the network level will boost available bandwidth significantly and reduce the need for storage and server capacity downstream. The play for Riverbed is to "extend our optimization into servers and into storage," said Saldich. "We're extending our reach into the data center for the first time… they [customers] can buy one product from Riverbed and improve IT infrastructure across all these elements. The primary motive [to buy] might be to improve bandwidth, but it improves application performance as well."

Riverbed's customer testing is showing bandwidth reductions of up to 90%. And Saldich notes that this level of optimization responds to the issues of today -- latency and the need for bandwidth -- but also lays the foundation for responding to the issue of tomorrow -- data proliferation. If data will reach the 20,000 petabyte level IDC/McKinsey predict by 2011 remains to be seen, but data loads are rising for most businesses. And optimizing network performance offers a way for businesses to increase performance without network upgrades. Of course optimization isn't free. Pricing has yet to be released for Atlas, scheduled to reach the market in the first half of 2009. The catch (if you can call it that) is that to use Atlas, you need Steelhead.