What's New in Riverbed's RiOS Version 5.0?

ImageOverview
Riverbed accelerates Microsoft Exchange 2007, further enhances ERP, CRM and web-based application performance, and delivers virtualized edge services with the new RiOS Services Platform (RSP) to simplify management of remote sites.

Speed - RiOS 5.0

Exchange 2007 Acceleration. With RiOS 5.0, Riverbed expands its support for Microsoft Exchange environments, and becomes the first wide-area data services (WDS) vendor to deliver a protocol optimization specifically for MAPI 2K7. RiOS 5.0 recognizes unencrypted Exchange 2007 traffic and applies specific application protocol latency enhancements to significantly improve performance up to 54x.

Web Application Acceleration. Riverbed expands its existing Web traffic acceleration capabilities to improve performance of enterprise Web applications even further. Organizations running enterprise applications such as SAP NetWeaver, Oracle, PeopleSoft/JD Edwards, Microsoft or Siebel CRM, SharePoint, OWA or other Web-based applications will see additional performance gains and improved response times.

By enabling additional HTTP/S acceleration modes including URL learning, page parsing, embedded object pre-fetching, metadata acceleration (304 Fast Response), and DNS caching, Riverbed can further reduce the chattiness and delay often associated with enterprise Web-based applications.

RiOS 5.0 delivers acceleration capability for Oracle 11i applications running in HTTP mode. This builds upon RiOS's existing support for Oracle 11i Jinitiator socket mode optimization and targets the Oracle E-Business suite of applications, particularly Oracle forms traffic and reporting as well as other application operations.


Scalability - RiOS 5.0

Hierarchical QoS. Riverbed already enabled QoS classification of traffic based on both bandwidth and priority in previous RiOS releases. With hierarchical QoS, customers can define different QoS specifications per application or per site. In addition Hierarchical QoS can tier class configurations and can be applied to Steelhead appliances that run in a virtual in-path mode. This QoS method also helps support deployments with diverse link speeds between sites, and the overall manageability of has been improved so that policies by site or application can be retrieved easily across the enterprise.


Simplicity - RiOS 5.0

RiOS Services Platform (RSP). The new RiOS Services Platform enables the delivery of branch office services without the need to deploy a full-blown server. RSP allows customers to deploy best-of-breed software on Steelhead appliances in a self-contained partition to minimize the hardware infrastructure footprint at the branch office.

3 WAN Visibility Modes. Riverbed provides flexibility for organizations that want to enable end-to-end transparency of WAN traffic by IP address and port or by port only. Steelhead appliances enable full IP or port-only address visibility on the WAN for optimized connections in addition to their default Correct Addressing mode. With three visibility modes to choose from, customers can select the appropriate mode of operation for their network without making broad-sweeping architectural design changes to implement WDS.

Enhanced Graphical User Interface (GUI). RiOS 5.0 introduces a new GUI leveraging AJAX and XML to revamp the web-based management interface for Steelhead appliances and the Central Management Console (CMC). The new interface provides more intuitive menus and simplifies management and configuration.

Role-Based Administration. The new role-based administration package for Steelhead appliances and the Central Management Console allows tasks and operational functions to be granularly assigned to different roles, and accounting functionality has been added to TACACS+ and RADIUS authentication. Roles-based administration also creates group inheritance capabilities so organizations can nest groups for easier management.

Security - RiOS 5.0

SSL Acceleration Enhancements. RiOS 5.0 continues to improve on Riverbed's industry-leading SSL acceleration functionality by making it even easier to setup and manage. Enhancements include client-side Steelhead appliance SSL auto-discovery, support for digital certificate domain-level wildcards, and manageability improvements for peer trust relationships. These new features simplify SSL acceleration across the enterprise to enable greater scalability and reduce administrative overhead.

IPSEC Enhancements. Expanding the existing support of IPSEC encryption on Steelhead appliances, RiOS 5.0 provides additional IPSEC encryption capability via AES-128, AES-256 and 3DES. IPSEC can be enabled to encrypt traffic over the WAN between Steelhead appliances.


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