Smarter, More Economical Branch Office Consolidation
Companies with branch offices continually seek more functionality with lower capital investment. To help customers make the most of their existing infrastructure, Riverbed has focused beyond its core product offerings with enhancements to its Riverbed Services Platform (RSP).

Performance requirements dictate that certain branch services, like IP address management, print server, video streaming, and security services, are run locally at the branch office level as edge services. Typically, each one of these services is deployed on its own hardware platform.

VMware Platform
Riverbed’s RSP reduces the branch hardware footprint by hosting “virtualized edge services” on the Steelhead appliance. Riverbed has documented and published APIs that allow third parties to create modules designed to run within Steelhead partitions. Built on enterprise-class virtualization technology from VMware, it's the industry's first integrated platform for third-party software modules.

The RSP allows organizations to virtualize essential third-party software modules onto Steelheads, further consolidating their IT infrastructures at the branch level and gleaning a greater return on their Steelhead investment. The RSP is an enterprise-class platform that can dramatically reduce the IT footprint of every branch by running up to five third-party software modules, eliminating the need for separate dedicated servers.

In a unique collaboration, Riverbed allows branch office partner software to leverage the Riverbed Operating System (RiOS) acceleration pathway, providing a tighter integration between Steelhead acceleration capabilities and the distinctive services of each application partner.

Each virtualized edge image runs in its own protected partition, isolated from the Steelhead’s WDS operations. They can’t impact the resources needed for peak Steelhead activity. With RSP, users run as many as five different virtual machines at once. That potentially removes five servers from each branch.

The RSP is available across the majority of existing Steelhead appliances, so legacy installations don’t need a fork-lift upgrade to take advantage of this new functionality. IT managers can:

• improve asset utilization, operational efficiency and business agility
• control IT costs and ensure end-user satisfaction
• and ultimately make the server-less branch office a reality.

Partners on the industry's first integrated platform for third-party software modules...