Riverbed Technology, Inc

File:Riverbed logo mini.jpg
Type	Public (NASDAQ: RVBD)
Industry	Networking hardware
Founded	May 23, 2002
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, USA
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Jerry Kennelly (CEO) Steve McCanne (CTO and EVP) Brett Nissenberg(SVP General Counsel) Mike Guerchon (SVP of Employee Services) Eric Wolford (EVP Marketing and Business Development) Randy S. Gottfried (EVP Business Services and CFO) David M. Peranich (EVP Worldwide Sales) Gordon Chaffee (SVP of Engineering) Stephen R. Smoot (SVP of Technical Operations) Mark Day (Chief Scientist)
Revenue	US$551.9 million (2010)[1]
Operating income	US$56.2 million (2010)[1]
Net income	US$34.2 million (2010)[1]
Total assets	US$736.1 million (2010)[1]
Total equity	US$537.4 million (2010)[1]
Employees	1244 (December, 2010)[1]
Website	www.riverbed.com

Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD) is a technology company that specializes in improving the performance of networks and networked applications. It was founded May 23, 2002 by Jerry Kennelly and Steve McCanne in San Francisco, California where its world headquarters remains. Riverbed's flagship product is the Steelhead Appliance, a networking appliance that combines several techniques to optimize data traffic and bandwidth utilization across a wide area network.

Riverbed products are often deployed to solve network bandwidth and performance problems in these areas of technology:

• Application acceleration - Applications that require access to resources across a WAN can run faster.^[2]
• Bandwidth optimization - The amount of traffic that runs across a WAN can be reduced, resulting in a decrease in network bandwidth requirements.^[3]
• Data center, branch office and server consolidation - The amount of computer and storage equipment required to support a branch office or remote location can be reduced through consolidation and virtualization.^[4]
• Data protection and Disaster Recovery - The time required to complete a backup cycle and to replicate that data offsite can be reduced, resulting in more data backed up in less time.^[5]
• Visibility and Network performance management - Network performance problems and anomalies can be automatically recognized so that problems on those networks can be identified, analyzed, and solved.^[6]
• Cloud Server and Storage Acceleration - Improve network performance into private and public clouds, enabling users to make better use of remote cloud-based computing and storage resources.^[7]

Products[link]

Riverbed offers products in several areas, all related to network optimization and performance.

WAN Optimization[link]

Steelhead Appliances
Riverbed's flagship product is the Steelhead Appliance which is a box that is connected to a wide area network, often behind the WAN router and in front of the Local Area Network switch. Each Steelhead appliance interacts with one or more Steelheads in other locations across the WAN to increase the efficiency and performance of network traffic. Steelhead appliances work together to reduce network traffic in three ways:

1. Data Streamlining: Primarily, data streamlining involves the removal of redundant data from WAN traffic. In place of redundant data, the Steelhead sends a reference to the redundant data that has already been stored on the remote Steelhead appliance, which can then insert the proper data back into the data stream. The result is a significant reduction in data that gets sent across the network. Steelhead appliances recognize and eliminate duplicated data regardless of the direction in which it is sent, the user who sends it, or the application that sent the data.^[8]
2. Transport Streamlining: TCP works inefficiently on networks where latency is high. Transport streamlining combines the use of TCP options and Riverbed proprietary technology to reduce or eliminate the impact of high latency, limited TCP window size, jitter, packet loss, and out-of-order packet delivery in order to improve overall data transfer performance and throughput. Transport streamlining also includes the option to introduce alternative transport layer protocols, including High-Speed TCP, MX-TCP, and TCP-Westwood.
3. Application Streamlining: Applications such as Microsoft Exchange, NFS and CIFS require complex and chatty interactions between clients and servers, and these chatty interactions result in slow performance in high latency network environments. Some application protocols may require hundreds or thousands of round-trip interactions in order to transfer a relatively small amount of data. Application streamlining reduces the number of round-trips over the WAN to reduce or eliminate the impact of high latency. Application streamlining also addresses any application-specific data encoding or encryption mechanisms so that data deduplication mechanisms can be applied on the original data format.

The software that runs a Steelhead appliance is called the Riverbed Optimization System or RiOS. The current version of RiOS is 7.0. There are more than 20 different models of Steelhead appliances available, each with a different capacity for connections and data traffic, ranging from a small desktop unit up to a high-end 3U data center model with solid state disks.

Many Steelhead Appliance models support the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), which enables them to run as many as five virtual machines in VMware Server directly on the Steelhead appliance.^[8]

Virtual Steelhead
While a standard Steelhead Appliance is a physical device, Virtual Steelhead provides the same RiOS-based WAN Optimization functionality in a VMware ESX or VMware ESXi environment, without requiring a dedicated physical device.^[9]

Steelhead Mobile
A third option for running RiOS is directly on a portable PC or Macintosh. Steelhead Mobile runs directly on the computer, and optimizes any WAN traffic that goes back to a data center where there is a Steelhead Appliance it can pair with.^[10]

Central Management Console (CMC)
The CMC simplifies the process of deploying, configuring, and managing Steelhead appliances. Administrators can manage, deploy, configure, update, and monitor as many as 2,000 Steelhead appliances or Virtual Steelheads from one web-based interface. Deploying, configuring, updating, and monitoring are all done through one web-based interface. The CMC is available either as a physical or a virtual device.^[11]

Interceptor
The Interceptor appliance extends the scaling and high-availability capabilities of Steelhead appliances to meet the requirements of the largest and most complex enterprise networks and data center environments. It clusters up to 25 Steelhead appliances so they can work together seamlessly to scale out to a million TCP connections and up to 12 Gbit/s of throughput.^[12]

Network Monitoring and Management[link]

Cascade
Cascade is an agentless solution for network and application visibility. Cascade does its work through a combination of capturing network packets and collecting network traffic, flow and packet analysis data from switches, routers, and other devices. It then calculates performance metrics, and sends alerts when network performance goes outside of expected norms.

Cascade consists of several components:

• Cascade Gateway collects network flow data from devices on the network.
• Cascade Sensor inspects packets and gathers application performance information in the data center, and is available as either a physical device, or as Cascade Sensor-VE, a virtual version that runs on the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP).
• Cascade Profiler correlates information collected by these devices, provides reporting and analysis of network problems and sends performance and security alerts.^[13]

Cascade Shark & Pilot
Cascade Shark is a turnkey hardware and software solution capable of sustained, multi-gigabit per second recording of network traffic.^[14] Cascade Pilot is a network analysis software product that integrates with Cascade Shark appliances and Riverbed Steelhead for a fully distributed, easy to manage packet capture solution.^[15]

Cloud Products[link]

Whitewater Appliance
The Whitewater appliance, introduced in November 2010, is designed to optimize backup data as it is sent from a backup application (e.g. Symantec NetBackup or Backup Exec) into a public storage cloud. The 1.0 release works with Amazon AWS; later releases will support other cloud providers. Whitewater is a single-ended appliance; data is deduplicated, compressed, and encrypted with AES-256 on the Whitewater appliance and then sent across the WAN to the storage cloud provider for long-term storage in that form.^[16]

Cloud Steelhead
The Cloud Steelhead appliance, also introduced in November 2010, provides WAN optimization for traffic going between users or an enterprise data center and a public cloud. Currently Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environments.^[17]

Company Information[link]

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Corporate History[link]

Riverbed Technology was founded May 23, 2002 by Jerry Kennelly, who is currently CEO, and Steve McCanne, currently CTO. The original name of the company was NBT (Next Big Thing) Technology, and it was renamed to Riverbed Technology in 2003. Jerry and Steve led internal development of the first Steelhead appliances, the 500, 1000, 2000, and 5000 models. The first product was shipped in April, 2004 to Environment Canada. Riverbed stock began trading on NASDAQ September 21, 2006.^[18]

Riverbed has been awarded InfoWorld Magazine's Technology of the Year for WAN Optimization every year it has been awarded: 2005,^[19] 2006, 2007,^[20] 2008,^[21] 2009,^[22] and 2011^[23]

Acquisition History[link]

Mazu Networks
On February 20, 2009, Riverbed announced the completion of the acquisition of Mazu Networks. The Mazu products, which were renamed Cascade, analyze network traffic to provide information about the interactions of and dependencies between users, applications and systems. This acquisition enabled Riverbed to add IT infrastructure performance solutions to its product portfolio.^[24]

CACE Technologies
On October 21, 2010, Riverbed acquired CACE Technologies, and folded their Shark network analysis product and Pilot interface product into the Riverbed product suite. CACE was also the corporate sponsor of the open source network protocol analyzer product, Wireshark. Riverbed has assumed corporate sponsorship.^[25]

Global Protocols
In November, 2010, Riverbed acquired Global Protocols, LLC, a provider of Satellite optimization to the defense marketplace. Global Protocols is known for their SkipWare product, a proprietary commercial implementation of the Space Communications Protocol Specifications (SCPS), which is used in most US Department of Defense communications satellites.^[26]

Zeus Technology
On July 19, 2011, Riverbed acquired Zeus Technology, a provider of high-performance software-based load balancing and traffic management solutions for virtual and cloud environments. Their primary product is the Zeus Virtual Application Delivery Controller (vADC).^[27]

Aptimize Limited
On July 19, 2011, Riverbed acquired Aptimize Limited, a provider of web content optimization technology, based in Wellington, New Zealand.^[28]

Expand Networks (Assets & Intellectual Property Only)
On January 11, 2012, Riverbed announced that it purchased certain assets of Expand Networks, including its intellectual property, out of liquidation in Israel. Expand went into liquidation under the supervision of the District Court of Haifa in Israel and ceased operating as an on-going business.^[29] FAQ: RIVERBED PURCHASES ASSETS OF EXPAND NETWORKS

Certification Programs[link]

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Riverbed Certified Solutions Professional (RCSP)[link]

The RCSP certificate is granted to individuals that demonstrate strong knowledge and experience in the theory, configuration, maintenance, and troubleshooting of the Riverbed RiOS product suite. While there are no set requirements prior to taking the exam, many candidates that have passed the RCSP exam have typically taken the Riverbed training classes and have also had at least six months of hands-on experience with Riverbed products.^[30]

Riverbed Certified Solutions Associate (RCSA)[link]

The RCSA certificate is granted to individuals that demonstrate knowledge and experience in the theory, configuration, maintenance, and troubleshooting of the RiOS product suite. While there are no set requirements prior to taking the exam, candidates that have taken Riverbed training classes, and have had at least three months of hands-on experience with Riverbed products, have a significantly higher chance of passing the qualifying exam.^[30]

External links[link]

• "Top 10 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies: #3", Forbes.com, 16 Feb 2011. Retrieved 18 March 2011.
• "The Muhammad Ali of Cloud Computing", Business Week, 27 January 2011. Retrieved 18 March 2011.
• "CRN's Data Center 100: #24", CRN Web Site, 21 January 2011. Retrieved 18-March 2011.
• "InfoWorld's 2011 Technology of the Year Award Winners: Best WAN Accelerator", InfoWorld, 12 January 2011. Retrieved 18 March 2011.
• "America's Fastest Growing Tech Companies: #2", Forbes, 1 April 2010. Retrieved 18 March 2011.

Competition[link]

• Riverbed's main competitors in WAN Optimization include Blue Coat, Cisco, Citrix, Ipanema Technologies, Juniper Networks, Infineta Systems, and Silver Peak.

References[link]

See also[link]

• Network traffic measurement
• Wireshark
• Cloud storage gateway