Cloud computing is clearly one of the today's hot IT topics, and many IT professionals are trying to understand how they can leverage cloud computing concepts. After all, who wouldn't want to offload their time-intensive and mundane tasks of maintaining servers and other IT infrastructure to a cloud services provider, especially if they can do it cheaper and more efficiently than you can?
Of course, once you outsource and virtualize your IT assets, the WAN becomes an increasingly important component of your infrastructure, since your end-users will now use the WAN infrastructure to access their cloud-hosted information assets. Without WAN optimization, endusers may become disappointed and disillusioned with cloud computing initiatives that promise to increase IT efficiency.
For years, Riverbed has delivered best-of-breed WAN optimization solutions that facilitate access over the WAN to remote computing assets hosted in remote data centers; these same capabilities are just as applicable to computing assets that are hosted in the Cloud. But the newly-available RiOS 6.0 provides a number of new features and capabilities that further enhance and extend Riverbed's capabilites for cloud environments, including the following:
1. Optimization for Oracle 12, including for JRE clients – With RiOS 6.0, Riverbed is the first and currently the only WAN optimization vendor to support optimizations for Oracle 11i and 12. With newly-added support for Sun JRE clients, Riverbed can now optimize end-user access to cloud-hosted Oracle E-Business Suite applications, including not only Sun JRE, but also through Oracle JInitiator, HTTP, and HTTPS (SSL).
2. Enhanced optimization for virtual terminal traffic — RiOS 6.0 offers enhanced capabilities to optimize RDP and Citrix ICA traffic that may be used to access and/or manage remotely-hosted applications in the cloud. Steelheads now offer the capability to dynamically disable the default encryption and compression for ICA, allowing them to apply Riverbed's SDR byte-level data reduction algorithms to the raw Citrix data. RiOS 6.0 is also able to individually apply enhanced QoS enforcement policies to Citrix virtual channels found in the ICA traffic.
3. Enhanced HTTP optimization — RiOS 6.0 introduces an object prefetch table for cached web objects. This feature complies with all HTTP 1.0 (RFC 1945) and HTTP 1.1 (RFC 2616) caching specifications and requirements, and it further adds to Riverbed's previously-available HTTP optimization capabilities (i.e., connection pooling, URL learning, parse and prefetch, and 304 fast response) for accelerating web applications that may be hosted in the cloud.
Today, a number of enterprises are already planning to use Riverbed to support their cloud-hosted applications. For example, Riverbed is working with several Fortune 500 companies who are actively planning to use the Steelhead solution to optimize access by 10,000+ employees to Sharepoint and Exchange servers hosted at Microsoft Online Services. The new capabilities introduced in RiOS 6.0 will only further enhance and expand opportunities for these and other enterprises to leverage cloud computing infrastructures.