Riverbed launched a new offering last week that embeds the VMware
vSphere hypervisors on Steelhead EX WAN Optimization technology. The virtual capabilities were also complemented with an updated RiOS (Riverbed Operating System) update as well as new Steelhead WAN optimization appliances.
“With vSphere on Steelhead, enterprises will be able to extend their virtual environments from the data center to be able to manage and control branch infrastructure that is also virtualized,” Miles Kelly, senior director, product marketing at Riverbed, told EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet.
Kelly explained that Steelhead’s previously have had virtualization capabilities on them, though they needed to be managed and spun up in the local branch. By bringing vSphere to the Steelhead EX, VMware’s data center tools like vCenter can now be used to manage and boot whole virtualization from the data cent out to the virtualized branch instance.
“It’s a central management story,” Kelly said. “Organizations can now wholly virtualize an entire application stack, the OS, the application server and the storage that is associated with it and project and provision that from the data center.”
From a virtualization management perspective having vSphere on both a branch Steelhead EX as well as the data center means that a VXLAN domain can run from on location to another.
Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
Riverbed Extends VMware vSphere for WAN Optimization
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
