Openet has established a partnership agreement with Riverbed to deliver industry-leading WAN optimisation technologies.
Riverbed's range of Steelhead appliances can reduce bandwidth utilisation by 60% to 95% and eliminate transport and application protocol inefficiencies to improve application performance over wide area network links.
The Riverbed Optimisation System (RIOS) addresses the issues of insufficient WAN bandwidth and inefficient transport and application protocols over high latency links through:
- Data streamlining
- Transport streamlining
- Application streamlining
Data streamlining
Data streamlining works by segmenting TCP traffic and indexing it. Once indexed the data is compared to data on disk. If the segment has been seen before then RIOS only sends a 16-byte reference instead of the actual data. By using a hierarchical index, a single reference can represent multiple segments and hence multiple megabytes of data. It is important to note that this occurs independently of the application which generated the traffic and that a given segment can occur in any number of files, emails, etc. Riverbed claim that their data streamlining technology alone can reduce WAN bandwidth utilisation by 60% to 95%
Transport Streamlining
Transport streamlining works by reducing the number of round trips necessary to transfer information across a WAN link. This is achieved through a combination of TCP window scaling, intelligent repacking of data, connection pooling and so on. This group of technologies has the most impact on high latency links particularly when chatty protocols are involved.
Application Streamlining
Application streamlining addresses the chatty nature of specific protocols such as Microsofts CIFS used for Windows file system access, MAPI used by the Exchange email system, TDS used by Microsoft SQL Server, HTTP used for web browsing and NFS used mostly by Unix based operating systems for shared file access. Riverbed claim that their application streamlining can eliminate up to 98% of roundtrips generated by application protocols.
The Riverbed Steelhead appliances are available in varying specifications to address individual link and client requirements ranging from devices suitable for small office deployment to fully clustered systems suitable for large data centres.