As Solution Integrators, we work with several of the WAN Optimisation solution from the main "big" vendors and we are pleased to see Riverbed be awarded as the "leader" as their product, support and innovation into Cloud Acceleration is truly awesome.

Of course today, WAN Optimisation is more than just optimising traffic between small offices with sluggish little internet links and their big data centres. Today IT pros face ever-increasing application sprawl and IT boundary complexity as more enterprise apps migrate to the cloud. This of course has fundamentally changed the way in which networks are designed, built and managed.

We are pleased to see how industry analysts like Gartner recognise Riverbed SteelHead as still leading the way in re-inventing WAN optimisation in the hybrid world - not only providing the technology to accelerate applications but also being a part of a wider solution set that allows businesses to guarantee service levels, gain complete visibility and control for all of their applications whether they on customer premises, in the cloud, or delivered by a third party SaaS provider such as Microsoft Office 365 or Salesforce.com.

Gartner says that the following are they key reasons for giving Riverbed the WAN Optimisation Crown for 2015.

  • Riverbed offers the broadest set of capabilities in the industry, including features for large branch office networks, data center replication and storage networking protocols, and single remote users.
  • Riverbed's SteelFusion appliance offers unique capabilities, allowing applications to remain distributed while storage is centralized.
  • The combination of SteelHead and SteelCentral AppResponse provides very good visibility and reporting capabilities for drill-down reporting across networks, servers, applications, Web apps, pages, objects, sites and users (including end-user experience).
  • The new Secure Transport feature supports an IPsec-encrypted overlay mesh network, and a partnership with Zscaler provides the ability to scan optimized traffic for security purposes before going to the cloud.

We are pleased to see them stepping up their Hybrid WAN offering as this has been a little limited until the recent release of RIOS 9. There is more coming later in 2015 and we are pleased to be one of only a few partners globally piloting and testing these developments.

Cisilion are a Premier Riverbed Partner with a full demo facilities in the heart of London. http://www.cisilion.com/who-we-are/partners

 

We are pleased to see Cisco up there too

We are also pleased to see Cisco make the top right quadrant. Their recent partnership with Akamai also shows they are moving to address the Cloud and SaaS piece and they continue to work on their mobile solution (currently a third party) though with the move to SaaS, we are not sure how much longer this will have relevance!

Cisco clearly has one of the widest portfolios of networking and inter-networking platforms, including Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) appliances, the Cisco ISR G2 and Cisco 4000 Series Integrated Service Router with Application Experience (ISR-AX) limited-function WAAS embedded in ISR G2 IOS, an OEM SoftWOC and the Cloud and of course their Services Router (CSR) 1000v with WAAS which also includes a high capacity WAAS appliance suitable for DC-to-DC traffic.

Cisco's strategy is mainly based on their router technology as the foundation of it's architecture with Cisco positioning the Cisco 4000 Series ISR as a "network in a box server" that has the ability to hosts all network functionality.

What we see as lacking (which is clearly recognised by Gartner) though in todays' world is the lack of application-protocol-specific optimisation such as Server Message Block (SMB), Exchange, Citrix ICA or SharePoint.

Cisco WAAS again though remains a great solution for small satellite offices - getting the right solution comes down to knowing what applications and services need optimising, how much bandwidth is at site, how many users reside at each location and what 3rd party network and/or application performance monitoring tools the business users.

Cisilion are a Tier 1 Cisco Gold Partner
http://www.cisilion.com/who-we-are/partners