Riverbed Technology, the IT infrastructure performance company, recently said it will begin to introduce solutions that extend the benefits of acceleration to applications and storage in the public cloud.

First among these will be virtual Steelhead for the cloud, a new addition to Riverbed’s award-winning WAN optimisation product family. The Steelhead product family offers organisations acceleration of applications and data regardless of location, including remote offices, private data centers and mobile workers.

At its publicly Webcast cloud launch event in New York City, Riverbed demonstrated the benefits of its upcoming virtual appliance for the public cloud.

In addition, Riverbed unveiled and demonstrated new technology for the acceleration of cloud storage.

“For over five years we’ve delivered the market-leading solution for WAN optimization that overcomes the performance barrier to successfully consolidating IT infrastructure into private clouds,” said Eric Wolford, senior vice president, marketing and business development at Riverbed.

“These same performance issues also affect enterprises as they move to public clouds. With our forthcoming products we will help customers break the performance barrier for cloud applications and cloud storage, starting with virtual Steelhead for the cloud,” he added.

“We will help customers achieve the promised benefits of the public cloud, while ensuring the same high-performance access to applications and storage that they have come to expect from their Riverbed-accelerated private clouds.”

“The cloud" is emerging at the convergence of three major trends: service orientation, virtualization and further consolidation of IT infrastructure.

Riverbed has developed technology that will broaden its cloud offerings to help enterprise and public sector customers address the performance issues that will occur as they embrace adoption of private, public and hybrid cloud models and their users move further from their data, said a statement.

“High latency alone will limit the types of applications that can find a home in the cloud,” said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group.

“Forcing new interfaces or rewriting applications to take advantage of the cloud will be another deal breaker for a lot of folks,” he added.

“If Riverbed can solve these issues the way they did for applications and data transfers on the WAN, they will open up the entire market.  If I can think of the cloud the way I think about a disk drive today, the possibilities become truly endless."

“Cloud storage, while offering potential operational and cost benefits, has inherent latency issues,” said Joe Skorupa, research vice president at Gartner.

“Users should take appropriate measures to ensure that either the type of data stored in the cloud can withstand latency issues or that measures are in place to overcome these concerns.”

“Our new technology will change the way enterprises and governments think about storage,” said Wolford.

“No longer will storage have to be tethered locally to the server. This frees IT leaders to locate and move storage assets to sites anywhere in the world, even thousands of miles away, to deliver the most cost-effective and intelligent architectures. This capability allows enterprises to bridge the public cloud and the private cloud—allowing them to take advantage of the best of both worlds,” Wolford concluded. – TradeArabia News Service