Riverbed boosts mobile WAN acceleration

Employees today expect to be able to work anywhere. At home, the airport, coffee shops, wherever. Many of us check our e-mail before breakfast and do some more work before bed, further blurring the lines between our work and personal lives. (Personally, I don’t mind the blurring, since it can work both ways. I may log on early or late, but I’m also able to attend a teacher conference or volunteer during business hours.)

For IT departments, the challenge is how to make it possible for employees to work productively wherever they need to. But being productive increasingly requires access to more than just e-mail.

This week Riverbed Technology announced an update to its mobile WAN optimization client that gives road warriors and remote employees speedier access to enterprise resources.

Steelhead Mobile 3.0 adds acceleration benefits for mobile users running Windows 7 and 64-bit systems, for instance. In addition, Riverbed has added optimization capabilities tuned for Microsoft applications including SharePoint, Office, Server and CRM.

Steelhead Mobile can speed Web applications by as much as 60x, Riverbed says, using techniques to reduce the chattiness and delays that slow HTTP and HTTPS applications. Acceleration methods in version 3.0 include URL learning, page parsing, embedded object pre-fetching and metadata acceleration modes.

Another new feature is what Riverbed terms branch warming, which allows mobile and branch office users to share optimized data to achieve greater overall acceleration.

This feature lets users share data references between the data stores of a Steelhead Mobile client and a branch office Steelhead appliance. In this way, mobile workers can contribute data references from their data store to help improve performance for an entire branch office, Riverbed says.

"We've found that the new Branch Warming feature helps our users switch seamlessly from working wirelessly to connecting back to a branch office with a Steelhead appliance. It greatly improves efficiency," said Michael Vassallo, senior network administrator at commercial furniture manufacturer Dancker, Sellew & Douglas, in a statement.

IT consolidation efforts are increasing the need for optimization, notes Cindy Borovick, research vice president at IDC. “Enterprise IT departments are being pressed to improve IT efficiency and employee productivity with a reduced IT budget. As more companies move forward with IT consolidation projects to cut costs, performance for end users is a concern. Mobile WAN optimization can help overcome this challenge by improving the performance of critical enterprise applications for remote and mobile workers,” Borovick said in a statement.

Steelhead Mobile 3.0 is expected to ship on December 2.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.