--- title: Technology News and Trends | Riverbed description: Riverbed | --- [![](https://info.cisilion.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Logo-Lock-Up_Dark-1.png?width=404&height=173&name=Logo-Lock-Up_Dark-1.png)](http://www.cisilion.com) # Technology News and Trends ## [And the 2015 WAN Optimisation Winner is...... Riverbed](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/and-the-2015-wan-optimisation-winner-is......-riverbed) Posted by [Rob Quickenden](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/author/rob-quickenden) 26-Mar-2015 12:04:00 # **So the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimisation Controllers has been released and for the eighth year running now, Riverbed is the leader...in the Leaders Quadrant.** 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. ![](https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_500_500/AAEAAQAAAAAAAALGAAAAJGYyMzdmYTI2LTI0ZGEtNDdjNC04ODdkLWFkNGNkNjA4OTZjZg.jpg) **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](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](http://www.cisilion.com/who-we-are/partners) [Read More](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/and-the-2015-wan-optimisation-winner-is......-riverbed) 0 Comments [Click here to read/write comments](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/and-the-2015-wan-optimisation-winner-is......-riverbed#comments) Topics: [Riverbed](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/riverbed) ## [Four Tips to help you prepare for Cyber Monday and the New Year Sales](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/blackfridaygoodorbad) Posted by [Rob Quickenden](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/author/rob-quickenden) 01-Dec-2014 09:29:28 # Avoid Network Operations Center Finger Pointing Did you learn anything from BlackFriday that will help ensure that on Cyber Monday you can better prepare your [network operations center (NOC)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_operations_center) for to advoid finger-pointing and blame for poor performance or denail of service. During this holiday season, the ITsystems for any retail business is mission-critical and business and sales  performance is going to be a direct result of your application performance—*and provbably the only time of the year you can really review your IT performance*. You need to get crucial monitoring and performance data to the right teams to avoid finger pointing when things slow down - let's face it, the last thing you really want to do when traffic is high is to have to invoke traffic calming to queue people to your website. Enterprise IT staff typically have daily, war room meetings to review and discuss network and application performance. Those who pass the finger-pointing test get to go home while others have to stay and figure out what went wrong with the network, the servers, and the applications. Here are four tips to help avoid that finger pointing at critical times.   ---   **1) Keep IT Simple.** You don't have to be in Media, eCommerce or retail to know that solving IT problems quickly can make a huge difference in the overall performance of your organiszations IT and client / customer facing business applications. The simpler your network and application monitoring tools and alerting systems, the easier it is for you to determine where the problem is, why its occurring and what needs to be fixed! Sounds simple right? But when you have complicated, non-shared tools for [network performance management (NPM)](http://www.riverbed.com/products/performance-management-control/network-performance-management/) and [application performance management (APM)](http://www.riverbed.com/products/performance-management-control/application-performance-management/), IT and network teams typically get hampered by any attempts to problem solve together as a cohesive team. Whilst in the the past, that did not matter as much because fixing the network usually solved most end user experience challenges. That's not the case now - i had just last week a client who'd been trying to fix some intermittent user issues for 3 weeks!! Within today's [Hybrid Enterprise](http://www.riverbed.com/SteelHead-and-SteelCentral-AppResponse-Enabling-the-Hybrid-Enterprise.html?pid=Force2014-SH-9.0-SC-APP-9.5-H1_2014.11.04_Event_Force) and with so many components affecting application performance, it's not always the network that is at fault.... it could be an application, part of an application, a database server or your Internet pipe! Knowing and fixing quickly is key to keeping the business running smoothly!   **2) Manage from the Top Down not Bottom Up - **the critical ingredient to the success of any business is to have the customer or end-user experience of business critical applications at the top of your priority list!  With today's hybrid enterprise and with applications and services spread across so many systems with many inter-dependencies, you need a performance engineering team that can manage and work across a number of different teams. Without this joined up approach, everyone will be working in their own silo and with no accountability for the overall success of your application delivery   **3) Ensure you have an integrated Cross-Architecture performance dash board - **lmost all troubleshooting begins in the NOC. As a network operator, you get a quick view of whether you have an application problem or a site problem with a dashboards like this: ![APM and NPM](http://media-cms.riverbed.com/images/AppMapper.jpg) This dashboard in the NOC gets you started. Where you go from here is up to the data and must be easily shared across teams to be effective when troubleshooting and fixing and issue.The dashboard above is from Riverbed's SteelCentral.   **4) Remember - Better Together! - **With a comprehensive set of passive and active NPM and APM monitoring tools such as those from Riverbed's complete [Application Performance Platform™](http://www.riverbed.com/products/application-performance-platform/), you have a much better chance of solving application performance issues across teams and much faster. Another advantage of Riverbed's set of solutions is a continued commitment to "Better Together" solutions. For example, [AppResponse 9.5 now integrates with SteelHead 9.0](http://www.riverbed.com/SteelHead-and-SteelCentral-AppResponse-Enabling-the-Hybrid-Enterprise.html?pid=Force2014-SH-9.0-SC-APP-9.5-H1_2014.11.04_Event_Force) for visibiility and troubleshooting WAN-optimized web applications on premise or by SaaS. [SteelCentral NetProfiler](http://www.riverbed.com/products/performance-management-control/network-performance-management/monitoring-analytics.html) provides [deep packet inspection (DPI)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection) data of the specific ports, protocols, and applications running in your branch offices from another together-is-better solution by integrating with SteelHead. --- Cisilion are proud to Riverbed Premier Plus Partners and Riverbed Authorized Support Partners.[ Contact us ](mailto:marketing@cisilion.com)for more information, to book a demo or explore a Proof of Concept. [Read More](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/blackfridaygoodorbad) 0 Comments [Click here to read/write comments](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/blackfridaygoodorbad#comments) Topics: [Technology News](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/technology-news), [Application Centric Infrastructure](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/application-centric-infrastructure), [Solving Business Challenges](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/solving-business-challenges), [Riverbed](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/riverbed), [e-commerce](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/e-commerce) ## [Will your Retail Store IT will survive Black Friday?](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/blackfridayriverbed) Posted by [Rob Quickenden](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/author/rob-quickenden) 28-Nov-2014 08:38:29 **If you or your team are responsible for running or delivery the IT for a retail store or chain today - the busiest shopping day of the year - the last thing you is urgent phone call only to be told that the point of sales (POS) system is down at one of your stores. ** **With shoppers lining up for today's Black Friday deals, bargains or the boxing day rush – you know that these sales make the difference between profit and loss, especially with so much traffic and sales now online!** **With panic on hand about just what has happened - you ask your branch manager, "When were the DR plans last tested?" A long pause followed by “umm….” confirms your fears. With little optimism, you instruct the branch manager to implement the DR plans.** ****What are you talking about – this won’t happen ****Well, this might sound a bit last decade and bit extreme  - but it does illustrate the impact that an IT Failure can have on a retail store and your sales! Today’s retail store environments are** heavily reliant on IT** (in store servers, WAN connectivity, POS systems, wired and wireless networks) – they are highly critical and there are **huge risks** and costs associated with any kind of downtime. Imagine even a less extreme scenario where the POS fails and checkout attendants need to switch to a manual or paper-based process - A US study last year found that[ 50% of customers who had to wait in line for longer than 5 minutes would avoid that retailer or brand in the future](http://www.retailcustomerexperience.com/articles/commentary-the-impact-of-checkout-time-on-customer-service-perception/). Yet like many branches, retail shops often lack the protection and DR plans that “online only” businesses have to keep them up and running at critical times. For your business to survive – this needs to change! ****Protecting your Retail Stores from IT Failure and Risk ****Many leading retail businesses are now taking “store IT” assets and turning them from a liability to a point of **competitive advantage**. Here we look at how with Riverbed SteelFusion®, branch office consolidation and WAN acceleration technologies can help you modernize, protect and improve the retail IT environment:    ![RiverbedSteelFusionRetail](https://info.cisilion.com/hs-fs/hub/302795/file-2147245504.png) ---   **1) Optimise those in-store applications.**  As the consumer retail experience becomes ever more digital, in-store apps drive revenue and operations. Riverbed SteelFusion can help by enabling businesses to centralise corporate applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint while delivering a fast and consistent experience to remote users/stores. Other applications such as Customer-facing and backroom apps including inventory and time management that “need” to run locally can be hosted directly on the SteelFusion platform. Riverbed SteelFusion ensures continuous operations of your store despite network outages with the added benefit of letting you store and manage servers and data centrally, transforming how you provision, protect, and recover services. **2) Streamline Point of Sale systems** With the most critical application in the retail store is the point-of-sale terminal. With SteelFusion, its possible to eliminates the need for a dedicated POS server. The POS servers can be run locally on SteelFusion to eliminate / remove the cost of keeping local servers/storage locally while providing additional security by encrypting any and all customer data. SteelFusion’s data centralisation provides near-real time customer data meaning its always available centrally in the data centre for analysis. **3) Empower Your Digital Signage.**  You will know that a critical component of a modern in-store experience is the use of digital signage for promotions, advertising, content, and pricing. Many of these today need a dedicated media server running in the back room. Because SteelFusion eliminates the need for the dedicated infrastructure that powers the digital signage, it means you can now run the media engine on the converged appliance to cut costs. What’s more, the built-in WAN optimisation can optimize and pre-populate video content, meaning a better experience in store. **4) Monitor customer experiences.**  One of things asked by marketing and finance is “how do you monitor the experience of customers using new in-store applications?”.  The question is are you meeting your internal SLAs with these apps? SteelFusion can provide remote application and traffic monitoring, which when coupled with Riverbed SteelCentral performance management can provide you with in-depth monitoring of transactions, the user experience, and your overall infrastructure performance. **5) Breakout customer Wi-Fi traffic.** One of the emerging aspects of the modern retail store is customer Wi-Fi and the growing expectation that this will just be available for free. By utilising Riverbed SteelFusion you can now eliminate the need to back haul internet traffic across your WAN or MPLS. Riverbed SteelFusion’s built-in WAN optimisation with Path Selection enables you to send Wi-Fi traffic – consumer or corporate – directly to the Internet. With SteelFusion you can easily leverage lost-cost Internet links such as ADSL and reduce the cost of bandwidth at each store location by more than 5 fold. **6) Eliminating stacks of IT and Storage and Back-up.**  Most stores have stacks of IT - including file, print, domain controllers, and directory servers – not to mention back-up servers and tape drives. Using Riverbed SteelFusion all of this can be eliminated – meaning you can get rid of the physical server and storage infrastructure associated with these servers by converging them onto the SteelFusion platform. All of this can be reduced down to a single 1U appliance. SteelFusion delivers power, cooling, and space savings and will easily fit into backrooms without complicated wiring.   What’s more, with all the data now stored in the Data Center (and projected back to the stores), you are also solving compliance, data integrity, security and performance issues. Cisilion are proud to Riverbed Premier Plus Partners and Riverbed Authorized Support Partners.[ Contact us ](mailto:marketing@cisilion.com)for more information, to book a demo or explore a Proof of Concept. [Read More](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/blackfridayriverbed) 0 Comments [Click here to read/write comments](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/blackfridayriverbed#comments) Topics: [Solving Business Challenges](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/solving-business-challenges), [Riverbed](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/riverbed), [Security](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/security) ## [SpotLight On: Load Balancing and Application Delivery Controllers](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/whatisloadbalancing) Posted by [Rob Quickenden](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/author/rob-quickenden) 17-Sep-2014 15:22:00 Yesterday, we ran an event at the Duck and Waffle Restaurant (40th Floor Heron Tower) on Optimising the Digital Experience with Riverbed's Performance Management platform and in particular SteelApp. We made a few un-due "assumptions" that all of our guests know what Load Balancing and "Application Delivery Controllers" are and how they work. We thought we would give a brief overview into each. ## **Acronyms and Terminology** GLBs, ADCs, Traffic Managers, Reverse Proxy's, Application Proxy's. These words/phrases were used a lot today in different contexts. We thought it was worth clarifying exactly what these “ADCs” and “Traffic Managers” actually do, and how they differ from plain and simple “Load Balancers”or DNS round-robin processes. ## **So – what is a “Traffic Manager?”** A Traffic Manager performs similar functions for a website (or web service), that a call flow management system does in a call centre. Think about a customer service representative in a small business for example. Their direct-dial number is published in the phone book or online and they handle in bound and out-bound customer queries, ranging from account queries, technical support questions, through to escalations and complaints. ## **This is where the trouble starts.** As this "small" company begins to become more successful, the volume of calls increases and customer service levels begin to decrease as calls are left unanswered or dealt with in-correctly. For example, the phone line may be engaged, or the customer service rep may be away from his desk, so calls get missed. In this scenario, the customer service rep is also busy dealing with all kinds of “unwanted calls” - : sales call, wrong numbers, spam calling from other company’s for example as well as personal calls. What the company needs is a way to control how phone calls are routed to employees to ensure that their customers are services by the right people in the fastest time possible. ## **So what’s the solution?** In the case of the example above, many businesses implement a call centre technology. A Call Centre is a great way to solve the problem as a company can sit a number of call centre “operators” on a call management system, to balance the phone calls across the members of staff, to route particular calls to particular departments and most importantly, to give them more control - such as stopping calls from certain locations, screening out nuisance calls, and in some cases, to even respond directly to customer inquiries. Above all it’s all about improving the customer experience… ## **How does this work for my applications then?** In a very similar way actually. In just the same way as the example above, businesses may have an online application (let’s call it an e-commerce website) that may be hosted with a single web server with a public IP address. As the business grows they quickly progress to building a farm of web servers which may be hosted on-premise in the cloud on in a hybrid combination of the two. To ensure that the applications are delivered in a timely, secure and most efficient way, businesses choose to deploy “Traffic Management” in front of these web applications. These traffic management systems (often referred to as “Load Balancers” or “Proxy’s”) are application delivery controllers. Their job is to manage the delivery of the critical applications and services that the business publishes. The effectiveness of these ADCs can be measured by one simple metric – the degree of control that the application delivery controller gives you in delivery the application to the use in the fastest and most personal way. ## **Ok, I got it! So where and how do I deploy them?** Virtualization and Cloud have had a significant impact on the architecture of applications and servers running in a business – this deployment model applies equally to ADCs. - **The old architecture was monolithic - **with all elements of an application deployed within a physical data center and physical ADCs in close proximity to manage the traffic. It was a static environment, with long lead times required to change or upgrade the overall application deployment. - **The new architecture is more flexible, **which follows the advantages of virtualisation**. **With elements of an application spread across a range of IT environments (and often in different locations) we can now place an ADC around each part of the application meaning we can ensure application availability whatever the demand without buying expensive static and “future proofed” hardware meaning we can not only better control costs, but we can support an environment that is more dynamic and distributed in nature.   ## **And an example of how Riverbed SteelApp does this is?** Yesterday, Steve Mavin (from Riverbed) spoke about ‘See Tickets’. See Tickets is one of the largest online ticket resellers in Europe, with over 34 million online unit sales per year.  The IT team at See Tickets was becoming increasingly aware that its website struggled to cope with huge and sudden spikes in web traffic – meaning they were missing sales! With 85 percent of ticket sales made online, and over 1 million page views per day, See Tickets is heavily reliant on the performance of its website infrastructure. When See Tickets launches a new event, thousands of people will hit their website at the same time, and there is a real danger that the web site will collapse. SteelApp steps in to act as a shock absorber, and manages the incoming requests to protect the application, and speed up the response time. Riverbed SteelApp was chosen for its flexibility and reporting metrics to monitor and review website traffic patterns, identify trends, and make informed business decisions. They use SteelApp to apply a series of application business policies to control the type, flow, and priority of traffic to their website. This enables See Tickets to manage traffic to the back-end servers to cope with the huge peaks of visitors coming to the site.  In addition, SteelApp Web App Firewall is a key part of the solution, providing an additional layer of security, giving See Tickets optimum protection for their online presence. See Tickets’ customers have the reassurance that their personal and financial information is protected, as they comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Online ticket sales and similar high-volume transactions are a great example of the way in which SteelApp can make a real difference to a web application: put simply, shorter response time means they make more money, and downtime means losing money. ## **Anything else?** Riverbed SteelApp, is the #1 **virtual** application delivery controller (ADC) for scalable, secure, and elastic delivery of your enterprise, cloud, and e-commerce applications. We'd love to hear from you to talk through your application and business performance needs. Please get in touch @Cisilion or contact me directly @rquickenden      [Read More](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/whatisloadbalancing) 0 Comments [Click here to read/write comments](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/whatisloadbalancing#comments) Topics: [Technology News](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/technology-news), [Application Centric Infrastructure](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/application-centric-infrastructure), [Solving Business Challenges](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/solving-business-challenges), [Riverbed](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/riverbed) [All posts](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/all) ### Subscribe to Email Updates ### Recent Posts ### Categories - [Solving Business Challenges (8)](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/solving-business-challenges) - [Technology News (7)](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/technology-news) - [Riverbed (4)](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/riverbed) - [Application Centric Infrastructure (3)](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/application-centric-infrastructure) - [Security (1)](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/security) - [e-commerce (1)](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/e-commerce) [see all](https://info.cisilion.com/blog/topic/riverbed#)