Riverbed this week introduced updates to its SteelHead hardware and software products that the network performance and observability vendor says will help enterprises keep pace with the complex data flows that challenge artificial intelligence initiatives, providing them with an efficient way to manage the data requirements of AI infrastructure.
Riverbed’s SteelHead products, powered by the vendor’s RiOS 10 acceleration software, will help enterprises speed the movement of data across connected clouds, data centers, and the edge with security and agility, according to the company. Riverbed also introduced a new flexible licensing model with its updated hardware and software news.
“This is our largest launch in seven years, principally driven by the new ways people need to configure their networks in this new world of AI, with a combination of new software, faster hardware appliances, and flexible business practices that allow our customers to consume our solutions in the ways they want,” says David Donatelli, CEO of Riverbed. The networking landscape is rapidly changing with AI, he says, requiring Riverbed to reimagine how data moves through data centers, clouds, and edge environments.
Industry watchers agree that networks are a critical underpinning to the AI initiatives across enterprises today and acceleration tools must be able to support the higher bandwidth loads without introducing latency. The network must be able to support the data migration and movement without performance degrading.
“AI has made networking much more critical again, across all different parts of the network. The research we did has pretty clear findings. AI drives the need to add bandwidth capacity, and enterprises need better, lower latencies because of a variety of ways that AI gets used. Part of what AI is, especially generative AI, involves gathering a lot of data on a regular basis and then using it for training these large and small language models,” explains Jim Frey, principal analyst, networks, at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Enterprises have to harvest more data than they did before and move it back to the training cluster. With genAI, they’re pulling more data into the inferencing engines, but oftentimes, they’re pulling it from a central site to where the inferencing is. That creates another bandwidth load that is latency-sensitive.”
Riverbed updated its RiOS 10 software with features including post-quantum cryptography, platform security, and confidential computing. The built-in security capabilities will help enterprises protect data today from future threats, according to Riverbed. The threat with quantum computing is that bad actors can capture encrypted traffic now and save it to potentially decrypt it later when the capabilities are available to them, according to Frey.
“Enterprises are worried about bad actors capturing encrypted traffic and saving copies for when quantum computing advances can break the encryption, providing the bad actors with free access to data. It’s a real concern,” Frey explains. “Post-quantum cryptography is a way to get ahead of that now.”
Riverbed also introduced the SteelHead 90 series of network acceleration appliances, which the company says will provide resilient network performance to customers. The series includes:
- SteelHead 8090, which delivers up to 60 Gbps of data movement over a WAN. It supports multiple 100 Gigabyte network interfaces to pull data from the LAN.
- SteelHead 6090, which delivers up to 20 Gbps of data movement over a WAN, targeted for mid-scale data centers.
- SteelHead 4090 and 2090, which support mid-sized data center and edge use cases, with 500 Mbps and 200 Mbps of accelerated traffic, as well as up to 10 Gbps of total traffic processing for quality of service (QoS) and application classification use cases.
- Riverbed SteelHead Virtual, is a software-only version designed for virtualization environments and private cloud deployments, which is compatible with VMWare ESXI, KVM, and Microsoft Hyper-V.
“For customers that are familiar with Riverbed, this is a big change in performance. We’ve gone from moving one appliance at 30 Gbps to 60 Gbps. We want to make sure that whether it’s new AI projects or existing data projects, we have ubiquitous availability across clouds,” says Chalan Aras, senior vice president and general manager of Acceleration at Riverbed. “We’re making it less expensive to move data—we are about half the price of traditional data movement methods.”
With this announcement, Riverbed also unveiled its Flex licensing subscription offering. According to Riverbed, Flex makes it possible for enterprises to transfer licenses from hardware to virtual to cloud devices at no cost. Enterprises can reassign license capacity across devices and scale capacity up and down on demand.
“Riverbed Flex allows us to continue to manage our network performance in a smarter, more agile way—exactly what we need in the fast-moving world of offshore operations,” said Dr. Alexei Vederko, Senior Director of Engineering from Viasat Energy Services, in a statement. “With rigs constantly relocating, IT must scale, move, and optimize network acceleration on demand. The Flex model allows us to replace and upgrade hardware, minimizing risk when equipment is lost or outdated. As a long-time SteelHead customer, our work with Riverbed allows us to effectively deliver critical data to our oil platforms and ensure operational resiliency. Riverbed Flex is a further step forward in future-proofing our network with greater flexibility and control.”
The SteelHead 8090 product will be available in May 2025. The SteelHead 6090, 4090, and 2090 products will be available in the second half of this year, according to Riverbed.
Source:: Network World