As organizations become more geographically dispersed due to acquisitions, entry into new markets and the move to lower-cost real estate, they are relying more heavily on WAN-based backup and data replication as key elements of their disaster recovery plans. However, this trend is placing a significant burden on the networks that connect users, systems and applications across locations. Increasingly complex applications and growing file sizes often intensify network congestion and cause serious performance issues.
WAN optimization can help solve this conundrum. By transparently accelerating backup and replication applications, WAN optimization solutions typically can cut backup windows by three times or more, and dramatically reduce bandwidth utilization — frequently by as much as 90 percent. Such performance gains allow organizations to reliably and regularly complete network-based backup without interfering with other applications that require the WAN. Most important, in the event of a failure, the recovery of data is accelerated so that business operations can resume as soon as possible.
The new Steelhead 7050 model WAN optimization appliances from Riverbed Technology deliver unmatched performance, flexibility, scalability and fault tolerance for large data centers. Combining new levels of bandwidth and TCP session scalability with solid-state drives (SSD) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE), this powerful new appliance allows enterprises to more cost-effectively manage large-scale replication across data centers, accelerate applications among many locations and users, and build large private cloud infrastructures.
“With the introduction of the Steelhead 7050, Riverbed once again proves its vision and leadership of the WAN optimization market. Especially well designed for disaster recovery use cases, the new appliance positions Riverbed to dominate in the data center,” says Arun Taneja, founder and president of The Taneja Group.
Solid State
The Steelhead 7050 is the first WAN optimization appliance where the persistent data store is 100-percent resident on SSDs, minimizing disk access times and latency to allow it to deliver the speed necessary to handle extreme workloads. The Steelhead 7050 optimizes up to 100,000 concurrent optimized TCP connections and up to 1Gbps WAN-side throughput, and utilizes up to four 10GbE network interface cards.
“The Steelhead 7050 comes equipped with up to 28 SSDs that allow for higher throughput for read, write and search performance. Faster throughput shortens the time required to move data across the WAN to DR sites, allowing enterprises to protect more data, more often,” said Greg Lefelar, VP of Sales, Jeskell. “It also delivers greater scale for accelerating branch office computing. And, like other Steelhead appliances, the Steelhead 7050 data reduction capabilities free up more bandwidth for business-critical applications, often reducing WAN traffic as much as 95 percent.”
Because enterprises face stringent recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO), WAN optimization appliances must be as resilient as the underlying storage hardware. The Steelhead 7050 model appliances provide data store fault tolerance to meet these requirements. If one of the SSDs fails, the Steelhead appliance maintains high throughput and continues to optimize data using the remaining disks — a unique feature analogous to RAID for disks. IT managers can replace SSDs and be up and running again quickly.
“Organizations can dramatically reduce their recovery time and recovery point objectives with WAN optimization products, and the Steelhead 7050 appliances take that to the next level through the use of solid state disks,” Lefelar said. “Furthermore, Riverbed has added impressive fault-tolerant features so that organizations are assured more reliable data protection and streamlined IT operations.”
High-Capacity, High-Availability
The Steelhead model 7050 appliances provide the highest WAN capacity in the industry. Steelhead 7050 can support up to four 10GbE SR cards and is equipped to handle up to 100,000 connections, offering the industry’s most scalable solution. Riverbed further extended the scalability of WAN optimization in October 2009 with the introduction of the Interceptor 9350, which enables the clustering of individual Steelhead appliances to meet the requirements of very large data center environments with up to 12Gbps total aggregate throughput and 1,000,000 concurrent connections.
“Interceptor is a specialized clustering device for high-capacity, high-availability Steelhead appliance deployments,” said Lefelar. “It allows clusters of up to 25 Steelhead appliances to work together seamlessly and simplifies network setup, while offering a wide choice of high-availability configurations to support the largest and most complex enterprise networks.”
Interceptor appliances ensure uninterrupted optimization operations in the event of a hardware or software failure. Multi-Interface Clustering provides customers with additional redundancy options, which ensures that no single link failure can cause the loss of connectivity between the Interceptor and the Steelhead appliance in the cluster. The Interceptor software now supports fail-to-block support, which enables the network to route around the failure.
“Many organizations find that insufficient bandwidth severely limits their ability to extend large-scale replication across the WAN. With the Steelhead 7050 appliances, distributed enterprises can ensure that IT performance is not a limiting factor in DR efforts or instantaneous access to business-critical applications. These solutions allow organizations to more reliably protect data and effectively respond in the face of disaster,” Lefelar said.