Riverbed taps solid-state drives

Riverbed Technology added a new twist to its latest WAN optimization appliances: Solid-state drives.

Riverbed’s Steelhead 7050 appliances are designed to boost throughput and performance, particularly in large-scale deployments such as for disaster recovery, data-center-to-data-center replication, or large private cloud infrastructures.

In the Steelhead 7050, the persistent data store resides on solid-state drives (SSD), to minimize disk access times and latency, Riverbed says. The Steelhead 7050 comes equipped with up to 28 SSDs that allow for higher throughput for read, write and search performance, which speeds the time it takes to move data across the WAN to disaster recovery sites, for instance.

The Steelhead 7050 optimizes up to 100,000 concurrent TCP connections and up to 1 Gbps WAN-side throughput, and it can handle up to four 10GbE network interface cards.

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Riverbed Technology added a new twist to its latest WAN optimization appliances: Solid-state drives.

Riverbed’s Steelhead 7050 appliances are designed to boost throughput and performance, particularly in large-scale deployments such as for disaster recovery, data-center-to-data-center replication, or large private cloud infrastructures.

In the Steelhead 7050, the persistent data store resides on solid-state drives (SSD), to minimize disk access times and latency, Riverbed says. The Steelhead 7050 comes equipped with up to 28 SSDs that allow for higher throughput for read, write and search performance, which speeds the time it takes to move data across the WAN to disaster recovery sites, for instance.

The Steelhead 7050 optimizes up to 100,000 concurrent TCP connections and up to 1 Gbps WAN-side throughput, and it can handle up to four 10GbE network interface cards.

The 7050 also includes datastore fault tolerance capabilities, so if one of the SSDs fails, the Steelhead appliance continues to optimize data using the remaining disks.

HNTB Corporation uses Riverbed gear to accelerate delivery of its centralized applications, speed data replication processes, and enable distributed employees to share project-related work, according to Wes Owen, manager of infrastructure services at the architecture and engineering firm.

“With the introduction of the Steelhead 7050, Riverbed has given us the opportunity to scale reliably and performance that we’ve never been able to achieve before,” Owen said in a statement. “As our storage environment grows, the new appliance should allow us to scale to meet the replication needs for all of our EMC platforms, including SAN, NAS, CAS, and Data Domain, to our disaster recovery site.”

The Steelhead 7050 appliances are expected to be available this quarter.

“Especially well designed for disaster recovery use cases, the new appliance positions Riverbed to dominate in the data center,” said Arun Taneja, founder and president of The Taneja Group, in a statement.

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