Riverbed Technology LLC Tuesday kicked off its 23rd anniversary with the biggest product launch in almost a decade.
The company that pioneered wide-area network optimization introduced major enhancements to its acceleration technology to help enterprises manage the explosive growth of data and artificial intelligence workloads.
For Riverbed, this launch brings the company full circle. At one time, the company dominated acceleration, also known as WAN optimization, resulting in a peak market cap of more than $6 billion in 2011.
Companies such as Cisco Systems Inc., Juniper Networks Inc. and even Oracle Corp. aimed to take a chunk out of Riverbed, but the company managed to stay ahead of the pack. I recall an investor call when an equity analyst asked then-Chief Executive Jerry Kennelly if he would consider selling Riverbed and the brash executive answered by asking something to the effect of “If you invented fire, would you sell it?”
However, being the de facto standard is both a curse and a blessing. As the world moved away from branch office computing to the cloud, the need for WAN optimization appliances faded and the company did not adjust. In came software-defined WAN and despite an acquisition of Ocedo, the company completely whiffed on “the next big thing” in WANs and let competitors such as Silver Peak quickly gain share and pass Riverbed. Since then, the company pivoted hard toward observability, leaving many industry watchers, myself included, to wonder if the company could ever regain its WAN mojo.
This week, Riverbed launched the new SteelHead 90 series powered by RiOS 10, an upgraded version of Riverbed’s operating system. The new high-end SteelHead 8090 appliance delivers double the performance of the previous top-tier model, supporting up to 60 gigabits per second of data and 6 Gbps of optimized traffic. It’s also more efficient, using about a third of the rack space, which helps reduce power and cooling costs.
Though SD-WAN may have put a big dent in the acceleration market, the current trend toward AI everywhere has the opportunity to move the pendulum back to Riverbed. One of the biggest challenges facing companies with AI is moving data between location and accelerated links significantly speed up the transfer while reducing the amount of data transferred.
During the peak of the branch computing industry, one Riverbed customer referred to SteelHeads as “network crack,” meaning once you got a bit of it, you wanted more and more. Several customers told me they would never run a non-accelerated link again. AI can make acceleration as important or even more so than it was over a decade ago when Riverbed was at its peak.
Riverbed cuts down on how much data must move across the network by avoiding duplicate transfers. Typically, customers see up to 90% less data being transferred, which lowers cloud egress costs by about 50% to 75%. In an interview with ZK Research, CEO Dave Donatelli (pictured) shared an example of one high-tech customer that used Riverbed’s optimization tools to reduce a petabyte of data transfer from 11 days to less than two days.
SteelHead 8090 is part of the new SteelHead 90 series of next-gen appliances. The 6090 model serves midsized data centers with up to 20 Gbps, while the 4090 and 2090 are tailored for edge and branch locations. Riverbed also rolled out SteelHead Virtual, a software-only version designed for private cloud deployments.
These improvements extend across Riverbed’s full product line, including physical, virtual and cloud, with performance doubling or tripling depending on the form factor, according to Donatelli. “The whole idea is that the dollars spent per gigabit of data moved are much more cost-effective,” he explained. “They’re more efficient, consuming about a third of the rack units. So, you save on power and cooling as you rack and stack these in your data center.”
In addition to speed and efficiency, Riverbed is placing a strong focus on security. RiOS 10 features post-quantum cryptography and confidential computing developed in collaboration with Intel. These capabilities help protect sensitive data, even if systems are breached. This is especially useful when moving workloads across hybrid environments.
When it comes to supporting AI at the edge, Riverbed has a new software solution that keeps data synchronized between distributed locations and central systems. SteelHead RS allows enterprises to run AI tasks where the data is being created, such as remote sites or branch offices. Therefore, the data stays aligned with their central systems.
Customers now also have more access to different cloud platforms with the expansion of SteelHead Cloud. It’s available through Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud and Google Cloud marketplaces. Using SteelHead Cloud, enterprises can move data and applications at speeds up to 20 Gbps, which improves performance and reduces data transfer time and cost.
Lastly, Riverbed overhauled its licensing with a new subscription model called Flex. This addresses a legacy pain point for Riverbed customers where they often felt stuck with current products and had to forward roll licenses on upgrades and the like.
Customers can now buy a pool of licenses and use them wherever they’re needed — on hardware, on virtual machines or in the cloud. They can scale up or down, shift between environments, or bring workloads back onsite. There are no extra costs involved, which is a major improvement over the old model, where licenses were tied to specific appliances and fixed capacities.
“What we’ve done is make it much more customer-friendly,” said Donatelli. “We’re at a time of transition in the marketplace. Customers don’t want to get tied down to software, to an appliance. They want the ability to take that software and then use it in different ways as their architectures and needs change.”
Since being acquired by Vector Capital in July 2023, Riverbed has shifted much of its business to observability. At one time, WAN optimization dominated, but now it’s much more balanced around the two areas. Its observability offerings include the Aternity software-as-a-service platform and a suite of network performance management tools. According to Donatelli, observability grew 102% year-over-year, while acceleration grew 59%, contributing to a 90% overall business growth.
“We collect a lot more data than anybody else to understand the blind spots, and we can impact performance in a positive way with our acceleration,” Donatelli said. “So we know what’s happening — observe — and we can then act on it — accelerate.”
These two business areas will now be given equal emphasis on Riverbed’s redesigned homepage. The new and enhanced Riverbed products are generally available starting this month, with further updates expected later this year.
