When ever I hear of new products and features, I put the statement through the paces to see if it’s total BS, or something worthwhile. A few weeks ago, an email caught my eye. Riverbed made their announcement of upgrades and product line additions.
I love what Riverbed can do for their customers. I won’t lie. No product is perfect, but it’s just been too damn useful to think bad about anything of it. When they bought CACE, and turned Wireshark into something even better (Riverbed Pilot is like Wireshark on crack with some redbull-fed gnomes for historical analytics)… well I am even happier with the offerings.
Riverbed just announced 2 new product models, and new features/options which will directly influence my customers.
RIOS Upgrades in 8.5
#1 Special application handler for SnapMirror!
(More information on this to follow… still working on labbing it)
This will PRIORITIZE the volumes being replicated over SnapMirror! This is HUGE!!! (Example, ERP volume replication given set bandwidth minimum so it always can proceed. Home directories given bandwidth when possible).
Do you understand how important this is? The ramifications?
Upgraded SLAs of replication! When you snapmirror, you can kick off up to 8 different replications at the same time in a NetApp controller. 16 per pair. I have customers with MANY Netapps per site, all SnapMirroring to different locations.
Before this, how would I guarantee that Bob’s Milli Vinilli MP3s and Bronie photos in his home directory do not take over the available optimized bandwidth and connections as compared to the companies ERP or Financial? I couldn’t. If you have Snapmirror and Riverbed, we need to do a happy little dance over this!
#2 Support for SMBv3. Awww yeah! NetApp lovin.
SMBv3 in going to take off fast. Rarely has there been a protocol which was touted so strongly years before it was available. And why shouldn’t it. It’s the first thing MS has tried to push down our throats in 2 decades which wasn’t full of suck.
I see SMBv3 flying into datacenters and a huge adoption rate within the next 9 months. I’m glad to see Riverbed is positioning itself, along with NetApp, to benefit the adoption rate. (Now, If we could only get VMware to adopt it or NFSv4.1/pNFS)
New product models
#1 Baby Steelhead CX255. These are targeted for the home office/small office (up to 10 people) at a VERY affordable price point. Also, we have smaller customers with T1s still, we could get them into these units quickly.
Many of our customers with tiny branches would just use the Steelhead Mobile Client on the desktops for the 2-5 user offices. No longer! This is some awesomely competitive pricing, and an easy tiny box.
Just preconfigure and ship with an ASA5505.
#2 EX1360, upgraded for the new VSP and Granite requirements. FINALLY giving a good amount of memory onboard to VMs. Larger branches without staff onhand will benefit from these.
It’s about damn time too! Windows bloat limited the # of VMs you could stuff on some of the smaller EX.
Having 8 cores and 64GB along with potential for Granite opens up some much larger branch-in-a-box opportunities.
To wrap it up… Granite 2.5 upgrades:
#1 Support for Fibre Channel luns (in the virtual Granite Core). Yes they use RDMs for this… but I’ve had customers ask for it. I guess Riverbed felt sorry for the people with Hitachi and other SANs w/o an IP stack.
#2 Support for natively SAN snapshotting NetApp, EMC, and Dell Equalogic Luns. Some pretty nifty awesomeness.
Over all, I am highly optimistic and look forward to deploying this.
If you are interested in seeing what Riverbed Steelhead, Granite, Cascade, or Wireshark/Pilot can do for you, let me know. We could even setup a proof of concept for you!
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