Riverbed Technology
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| Riverbed Technology, Inc | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public (NASDAQ: RVBD) |
| Founded | 2002 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, California, USA |
| Key people | CEO : Jerry Kennelly (CEO) |
| Industry | Networking hardware |
| Website | www.riverbed.com |
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Riverbed Technology, Inc. is an American Technology corporation that designs and manufactures wide area data services (WDS) appliances.
Riverbed Technology's world headquarters is located in San Francisco, California.
Riverbed develops infrastructure appliances to improve the performance of client-server interactions over WANs without breaking the semantics of the protocols, file systems or applications. Whether it’s simply copying a file from a distant file server, getting mail from a remote Exchange server, backing up remote file servers to a main datacenter, or sending a very large CAD file to a colleague across the Pacific, slow WANs cost money.
Riverbed’s approach can improve the performance, or throughput, of client-server interactions over WANs by up to 100 times or more, giving the illusion that the server is local rather than remote. That degree of improvement can enable enterprise customers to centralize currently distributed resources like storage, mail servers, and file servers and deliver new WAN-based IT services that have not been possible before.
Riverbed has developed a software-based appliance solution that addresses both the bandwidth problem as well as the latency problem. The product is called the Steelhead appliance; it is a Linux-based appliance deployed in the network infrastructure at both client side (typically remote offices) and server side (typically a data center or other major facility).
The Steelhead appliance is a transport-level TCP proxy that conceptually operates in pair-wise configurations, with a Steelhead appliance situated near one or more servers (the “server site”) and another situated near clients (the “client site”). Though Steelhead appliances communicate with one another in a paired fashion, the architecture allows them to be clustered and meshed across the WAN, as any Steelhead appliance can communicate directly with any other, so that a server-side Steelhead appliance can communicate with “n” client-side Steelhead appliances.
Steelhead appliances intercept client-server connections without interfering in the normal client-server interactions, file semantics, or protocols. All client requests are passed through to the server normally, yet relevant traffic is optimized to improve performance. With this approach, Steelhead appliances can be easily introduced into an enterprise environment without requiring any significant changes to the network or architecture.
