Consolidation and virtualization are hot trends in IT, helping businesses increase their flexibility and efficiency in delivering valuable services while reducing costs. The enhanced Riverbed® Services Platform (RSP) provides customers with the capability to run up to five additional services and applications virtually on VMware in a protected partition on the Steelhead® appliance. This revolutionary approach delivers the customers with a Branch Office in a Box solution.

This allows customers to deploy local services in all their branch offices without the need to deploy and maintain full-blown servers to run the applications. The business benefits are minimizing the hardware needed at the branch office, enabling companies to consolidate IT operations even further, reducing costs, and simplifying administration, all while still delivering essential local services. Check out the latest discussions about RSP on the Riverbed Community Forum.

IT Consolidation at the Edge

Organizations have widely implemented IT infrastructure consolidation measures to reap many of the well-known benefits: simplified management, lower costs, and improved data protection and resource utilization. Despite these efforts, there are still services that must be delivered locally.

Local print, DNS, DHCP and File Services are good examples of these type of "edge" services that many central consolidation efforts. The RSP now allows organizations to run these services on the Steelhead appliance, so organizations can eliminate these now redundant servers to further reduce hardware, software, and maintenance costs and IT complexity.

The RSP is uniquely suited to branch office server consolidation and virtualization. First, the Steelhead appliance is the only wide area network (WAN) optimization device to run industry-leading technology from VMware as the virtualization platform, taking advantage of the skills companies already have in house. Virtual servers run in a protected zone and do not impact the resources needed for peak Steelhead appliance operations. The RSP also enables customers to run up to five different virtual machines at once, eliminating many more servers from the branch office. Also an enhanced heartbeat monitors the health of these virtual machines, and can gracefully restart them or send an alert.

The RSP runs on most Steelhead appliance models, enabling customers to benefit without having to replace their previous investments in Riverbed.

Benefiting from the Riverbed Technology Alliance (RTA), the RSP also supports tested applications from a wide variety of category leading products, as well as any VMware virtual machine.

RTA partners with software that can be run on the RSP:

Riverbed Packages

Steelhead Mobile Controller VE - Manages Steelhead Mobile licenses and controls the deployment, management, and reporting of Steelhead Mobile software clients.

Cascade Sensor VE - Enables seamless performance measurement and delivers network visibility in both optimized and non-optimized environments - without requiring expensive physical probes in every branch office.

Edge Services Solution – Enable services like DC, AD, file and print serving, streaming media and BranchCache while delivering LAN-like performance for end users around the globe.

Run Windows Server 2003 or 2008 for DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, print serving, or streaming media. Visit the Windows Server website.

Security Gateway R70 protects your virtual systems with the same best-of-class security that you rely on for your physical network. It enables you to segregate virtual systems from each other as well as from external threats. Security Gateway R70 extends your open choice to encompass Check Point appliances and software, "Secured by Check Point" appliances, and virtual systems — all managed by a single interface to ensure consistent, efficient security management. Read the solution brief or visit the Check Point website.

Comprehensive web filtering security in a gateway solution to protects against spyware, malicious mobile code, phishing, bots, and other threats. Also blocks spyware and keylogger communications from reaching host server and provides phishing protection. Read the solution brief or visit the Websense website.

Run McAfee’s Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliance with firewall, VPN, Web filtering, Anti-Spam and Content Filtering functionality on the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) that resides within the Riverbed Steelhead Appliance. Read the solution brief or visit the McAfee  website.

The Microsoft Threat Management Gateway (TMG) on RSP will provide URL filtering, proxy and application-and network-layer firewall in a single solution alongside our WAN acceleration. Read the solution brief or visit the Microsoft Forefront website.

Video Solution – Delivers a complete video communications and streaming solution that captures and manages live and on-demand video, distributes Flash and Windows Media formats, and reduces the impact of video bandwidth consumption on the network.

Run consolidated core network services – including DNS, DHCP, IPAM, RADIUS, TFTP and others – that are critical to the operation of all IP-based networks. Read the solution brief or visit the INFOBLOX website.

Achieve greater application performance across satellite wide area networks (WANs) while maintaining SCPS (Space Communication Protocol Standards) interoperability. Visit the Global Protocols website.

Vyatta Subscription Edition implements a full router appliance feature set in software that can run in the RSP on Steelhead appliances.