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The Riverbed Performance Platform A Visionary Approach to Enterprise IT

The Riverbed Performance Platform Vision

© 2012 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 1

Riverbed: The Performance Platform Vision Performance matters to our customers. Whether customers are considering performance as raw application speed, as cost efficiency, or as reduced complexity, customers are looking at ways to improve their IT architecture to deliver applications faster and more effectively. Riverbed is the performance company. Our vision is to give customers the tools to create the highest performing IT environment possible, enabling users everywhere to be more productive while giving IT teams greater control over their enterprises’ technology resources. Our vision focuses on the intersection of applications, servers, networks, and storage, and brings customers a single, unified view of performance in their distributed environment. Our recent experiences talking to enterprise architects worldwide have shown that organizations are trending towards two main ideas for what their IT infrastructure must achieve in the next few years. This document outlines those end goals and how Riverbed will help businesses achieve them, also covering the core technologies that make this possible. Enterprise Vision As opposed to focusing initially on products and what they can do for a particular use case or vertical, consider the broader goals of accelerated user flow and fluid data centers. This will help illustrate how to build a high performance enterprise infrastructure that supports the goals of users, IT, and business owners. Let’s examine these requirements in more detail and then see how a Performance Platform can help.

An illustration of a comprehensive inter-connected enterprise infrastructure.

Accelerated user flow End users want to be productive just as much as the business wants them to be. Most people thrive in environments where they are set up to succeed, and IT has a strategic role in that process. Simply put, users expect applications to be faster. No matter where the user is based (HQ, branch office, on the road, or by extension even consumers at home) applications are supposed to be always on, always reliable, and faster than ever before. Empowered end users will be more productive, more capable, and will help bring new innovations to market faster or be better informed, more engaged customers. In the current work environment, end users are typically moving among locations frequently (in the office for part of the day, at a customer site, and then working from home), and even switching devices frequently. They may be using a corporate-provided desktop or laptop, then entering customer information via their personal smartphones, and finally working on a personal computer at home. The applications might be traditional enterprise applications in a corporate data center, software-as-a-service (SAAS) applications, or applications running in a hybrid cloud environment. But in all cases, they still expect high performance applications that are fully accessible. Downtime is not an option; change windows are shrinking in a global world; and while IT professionals understand that network latency slows applications, it is not a viable excuse to the CEO, business owner, or even the average end user.



Fluid data centers If you were to ask IT architects how they would design their infrastructure if they were starting with a blank slate, most would say something along these lines: put all the data and applications in one or two data centers, and have everyone access it from there. Why? First, it’s operationally the simplest potential solution to the challenge. Second, it reduces cost, as infrastructure can be shared across many applications or business units. Third, it reduces risk because a few locations can be secured more easily than dozens or hundreds. Finally, it allows IT to react more quickly to changes in business requirements. All the assets are in one place, as well as the smart people to operate them, so it’s much simpler to reorient teams toward new challenges or business priorities. For the past five years enterprises have been moving toward this vision: a consolidated, virtualized infrastructure contained in fewer data centers and serves a distributed user base. The cost and risk elements alone are compelling and justify the transition – but for most organizations the potential for IT to respond faster is even more impactful to the business. Server virtualization has been a major driver of this change. Even in cases where a business is not looking to adopt the cloud paradigm, virtualization has changed the way enterprises design and resource applications in their data centers. And for those who haven’t changed their designs, even more challenging is the fact that the business has expected them to have done it. An extension of virtualization is the move to cloud – inclusive of private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud operating models. Because of cloud, business owners now see IT as capable of “instant-on” functionality, so IT must be now positioned to quickly and easily spin up applications and storage to support business initiatives or control costs as needed. Cloud services have made it possible to spin up a new data center within minutes. Of course the challenge isn’t just provisioning the compute or storage, it’s getting the right applications and data running in that new data center, and directing users seamlessly to those new resources. So while virtualization and cloud has made flipping the “on” switch very easy, there are still significant challenges in understanding how bright the bulb will burn. Tied closely to the concept of being “fluid” is the ability to support geographic growth and reorganization as easily as supporting reallocation of resources within the data center. Organizations have continued to spread out to more locations in their state, country, or around the world. At the same time, organizations have been consolidating branch infrastructure so that resources are more secure and more accessible to a global audience. Ideally, the characteristics of control and efficiency in the data center can be logically extended to remotes offices as well. Finally, being fluid requires the ability to implement new levels of intelligent functionality that may not even exist within a standard product. An enterprise’s requirements or challenges might demand IT to do something very different with a product compared to how its typically deployed, or it may simply require fine-tuning of operations to act in a more automated, intelligent manner that better supports customer demands. With the convergence of trends like consolidation virtualization, and cloud, IT operations is now at the nexus of data center change in a world where application and infrastructure environments are as fluid as end users who flow from one location to another.

Barriers to these Enterprise Goals Despite these continued efforts to control costs and simplify management through consolidation of infrastructure, distributed organizations have continued to distribute IT to support those branch locations. Typically the reason has been that consolidated infrastructure can’t support the business requirements: either access of data was too slow or too limiting. In response, IT teams are forced to throw more resources at the problem and take a step away from the fluid data center goal. As a result, those branches typically have increasing investments in servers, storage, and ever-increasing networking budgets to support the operations that now happen across the business.

Accelerated user flow • Users access data and applications

faster and more reliably from anywhere.

• Businesses are more productive, more collaborative, and can get new products to market faster.

Fluid data centers • Flexibility allows consolidation, and

more responsiveness to changing business demands.

• Business can also better leverage private and public clouds.



Going one level deeper, these limitations typically come from a few different issues: Application: In many cases the application wasn’t designed for the level of complexity or performance that is required in the production environment. It does not efficiently use resources, nor does it optimize its operations for user platforms (e.g. desktop vs. laptop vs. tablet.) In many cases the application and its protocols may be poorly designed for working in a distributed environment. Server: Frequently the server infrastructure supporting the application is not designed for a flexible, high performance, global environment. The environment often cannot deal with peaks in traffic, global load balancing, or instant failover. Network: Resources for network access are typically very limited. In many cases the wide area network (WAN) has less than one percent of the bandwidth of a local area network (LAN), yet more and more users depend on the WAN or the Internet for access to applications and data. In addition, access over long distances often means higher latency for application access, further limiting performance and the end user experience. This limited resource can be the bottleneck which prevents enterprises from successfully consolidating infrastructure. Storage: While applications can be sensitive to performance and network concerns, storage infrastructure is far more sensitive. Users who are doing very large (multi-gigabyte) file reads or file writes must typically be in the same location as the server. Both users and applications accessing storage cannot deal with disconnected operations, in the event that a network connection is lost. These same technical limitations put a ceiling on the typical end user experience. Application design, infrastructure design, network constraints, latency, all limit the user experience. If a user is accessing an application via a smartphone or tablet, today the experience may be further reduced.

Delivering the Unified Performance Platform Riverbed can help enterprises achieve its goals by overcoming performance limitations in enterprise infrastructure. We aim to take a unified approach to the challenge of performance, uniting distributed and diverse users with many types of applications that are consolidated into the data center and also extended to remote locations. Leveraging technology that can overcome performance barriers, IT can then support branch offices at the same levels of performance and efficiency, as they have come to expect from local infrastructure, while providing more scalable, reliable management. Data is securely protected centrally, but users have local-like access to applications and data from established locations. Even on-demand locations can be readily spun up to meet new customer requirements or business changes. Why pursue a performance platform, as opposed to having various, independent performance products? We are providing both.

Our goal is to give customers the benefits of a performance platform, but to do so by strategically integrating stand-alone products. These products, in and of themselves, will deliver high performance gains and quick payback. Tied together, however, they have the potential to do even more. Our section later in this paper entitled “vision” describes how this tight integration brings even more performance to enterprise environments. In a way, our approach is analogous to the

evolution of the network security industry. Before there was ever a security “industry,” there was a market for firewalls. There was also a market for VPNs, and a market for anti-virus. Over time, these smaller markets came together to form a more complete approach to dealing with data threats. Customers may still buy a standalone VPN or firewall, but it’s more likely today that they are looking at those purchases within the broader context of their security strategy and investments.



We believe the same transformation will take place for performance technologies. Today customers purchase a WAN optimization controller, an application delivery controller or a cloud storage gateway. Separately they may also purchase a performance monitoring system. In the future they will look at an integrated strategy to performance that will drive larger, more comprehensive decisions on enabling better application performance across the data center, cloud, branch office, and mobile worker. In order to achieve the benefits of a performance platform, all of Riverbed’s products described below deliver a combination of three benefits: Analyze: enterprises need the ability to quickly understand application performance across distributed infrastructures and distributed user bases. Just as important to understanding applications is the ability to have tools that quickly pinpoint problems while providing high-level views that match management needs and detailed views that are useful for engineers. Accelerate: businesses want the ability to accelerate all types of interactions with IT systems and gain new efficiencies in a time where cost cutting has increased in importance. This efficiency means everything from a user accessing an application, to complex back office operations such as data replication, system migration, consolidation, cloud transformation, and more. Control: just like acceleration, the need for control comes in many forms. IT must control data risk by enabling information security, but at the same time must ensure high levels of performance and access. They must prioritize limited resources to align with business requirements. Security is enhanced enterprise-wide by consolidation of all resources and extension of these services from the data center to the branches.

Riverbed's Performance Platform Riverbed delivers five different product lines to support these end goals. As a performance company, Riverbed's goal is to have the most comprehensive portfolio of performance products anywhere. We work with customers to determine whether they should implement one, a few, or all of these products to meet their goals. These products complement each other in different ways, but our philosophy is that any one of them can provide immediate benefit with simple deployment; more in-depth tuning can lead to even greater benefits and cross-product capabilities. This last idea is where the platform concept comes to fruition. It’s not only that any one of these products provide performance optimizations for your infrastructure, but the products themselves can be integrated in ways that provide even greater benefits across your own organization – based on what your business needs and the unique ways you have implemented your own IT systems. Some examples of that integration are described below. First, however, let’s discuss the products themselves.

Steelhead - Steelhead is the industry leading WAN optimization solution. It allows customers to dramatically accelerate applications up to 100x and cut WAN bandwidth use by 65-95%. These benefits, combined with its virtualization capabilities, offer a dual approach to consolidating branch office infrastructure. Enabling the fluid enterprise by simplifying branch management, reducing costs, and increasing operational agility. Steelhead branch consolidation solutions provide IT with greater control over service delivery, while reducing ongoing operational costs.

Tens of thousands of customers use Steelhead products in their environments today. Typically, customers report using these products for a few core needs: application acceleration to branch offices and mobile workers, application consolidation and virtualization, bandwidth optimization and savings, and data protection acceleration. Riverbed has created a number of innovations in this area such as disk-based deduplication of data, application protocol acceleration, latency sensitive-QoS, and more. The end result is a symmetric acceleration technology that gives customers the best performance across the broadest range of applications. According to the analyst firm IDC, a survey of Steelhead customers shows a fast ROI: typically about 7 months.

Granite: Riverbed® Granite™ is edge virtual server infrastructure (Edge-VSI). Granite radically reduces operational burden on IT managers while massively increasing their control over the infrastructure—all at a lower total cost of ownership. Granite is the innovation that enables an architectural disruption known as Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure (Edge-VSI). Edge-VSI enables the best of all worlds: 100% consolidated data and applications that deliver LAN performance at the edge over the WAN.



Granite delivers complete server and storage consolidation. Certain business applications still require local servers and storage to meet the performance requirements of end users. With Granite, IT can successfully separate branch computing from data storage eliminating the need to purchase and support servers and storage traditionally hosted in branch offices for performance reasons. Users and applications in the branch experience local performance while data is consolidated securely in a central location. With Granite, storage administrators can also extend a data center SAN to a remote location, even over a low bandwidth link. Granite delivers business agility, enabling companies to effectively deliver global storage infrastructure anywhere it is needed.

Stingray - The Stingray application delivery controller (ADC) family is used by enterprises and large-scale web organizations to improve application performance and to manage the delivery of complex, business-critical web services. Stingray provides data-center based performance optimization, server offload, application reliability, web content optimization, and application firewall capabilities. Stingray also provides robust scripting capabilities that allow enterprises to customize functionality based on their own business requirements.

Thousands of customers use Stingray today, both in private cloud environments but also in public cloud environments such as Amazon, RackSpace, ACS, and more. Gartner Group has rated the technologies in the Stingray family “visionary” for their advanced approach to ADCs in the rapidly changing data center environment.

Cascade - Cascade offers application-aware network performance management, so managers can resolve network and application performance problems before they impact the business. Users can discover, monitor and troubleshoot critical services, get accurate data for strategic IT projects, and communicate performance results clearly to the business, all while lowering IT management costs. Cascade combines flow-based and packet-based monitoring for a complete view of your environment, and integrates seamlessly with Wireshark, the most widely used open source network analysis tool.

Using Cascade means an enterprise can effectively gain an end-to-end view of performance throughout their distributed infrastructure. These views allow enterprises to find problems faster, and reduce the mean time to respond by 80% or more in some cases. Analyst research by IDC shows a payback period of about 6 months on Cascade investments.

Whitewater - Whitewater gateways optimize cloud storage, secure data and provide businesses with drop-in access to public cloud storage with local-like performance requiring no changes to the existing backup infrastructure. Built on Riverbed’s industry-leading optimization, network and storage deduplication, and dual-layer encryption, Whitewater overcomes the barriers to making cloud storage an integral part of an organization’s data protection strategy.

Customers report securely accelerating backup to the cloud by 20x or more, leveraging a combination of deduplication and protocol optimization. This performance allows them to potentially eliminate tape backup while cutting the costs of data protection by up to 50%. Whitewater also gives customers the ability to effectively offsite backup data while knowing they have the performance levels needed to access that information when it is needed.

The Unified Performance Platform Vision Riverbed's product families have proven themselves in tens of thousands of real world customer environments. Working with our customers, we have steadily built core integration that delivers more value from the platform across a distributed environment. For example:

• Cascade Shark packet capture capabilities have been embedded in Steelhead appliances, providing on-demand branch packet analysis without the need for additional remote infrastructure. At the same time, Steelhead appliances can export advanced NetFlow information to Cascade Profiler.

• Stingray ADC has integrated the Cloud Steelhead discovery agent, ensuring that users accessing applications in the

cloud get the best possible combined optimization from ADCs and WAN optimizers.



• Cascade Profiler can incorporate and map Stingray virtual IPs to the physical IPs of back-end servers, providing users a more comprehensive view of their entire application delivery path without complex data mapping or spreadsheets.

• Whitewater leverages the battle-tested deduplication mechanism within Steelhead, providing significant storage savings

in addition to Steelhead’s bandwidth savings. And while these integrations are useful and powerful, we believe they only scratch the surface of the powerful cross-product capabilities that we can offer enterprises. As customers have become more familiar with these products, and as they have grown in use across the world, two seemingly disparate requests often surface: Allow enterprises to take advantage of your base functionality, but customize deployments to provide performance benefits for unique use cases. Enterprise environments are rarely alike. While many have used some of the same applications, the use cases are often highly customized and the logic behind what should be optimized can be radically different. Make your systems easier to integrate into other management platforms. As infrastructure becomes more distributed and more complex, it becomes more difficult to manage any one vendor's products, solutions, or even platforms. Allowing customers to tie new investments into existing system orchestration tools or management tools provides high levels of operational benefit.

Programmability We believe there is a unified approach that can solve these two challenges, without detracting from the general perspective that Riverbed's products are easy to implement and provide value out of the box. That approach is to take the products that make up our performance platform and further enhance them through programmability. The concept of programmability can significantly change the way users interface with our products, and also gives them the capability to tie together disparate functions into unique workflows to address their specific use cases. These may be referred to as long-tail use cases: they are not the common use cases such as supporting an out-of-the-box Exchange implementation, but instead more challenging use cases that are less common or often unique to a situation. We will describe two of these below. Today, Riverbed provides forms of programmability within its products. For example, Riverbed Stingray ADC has a powerful language called TrafficScript that allows application developers to develop richer, more capable applications without radically re-architecting their applications. Customers use TrafficScript to provide specialized request handling, greater security and authentication for sensitive transactions, and better protection for images and documents. Steelhead has the Riverbed Services Platform, which allows customers to put third-party virtual services in our device for more powerful & cost effective branch operations. RSP then allows the operator to use its “TAPS” to control the flow of data between the different services on a device, thereby producing a different data flow based on the needs of the office. These capabilities are powerful, provide high ROI for customers, and are available today. They are used in thousands of real-world environments already, and show a strong need for the continued development of programmability within the platform. Our vision, however, goes further than that. Provide a single, comprehensive set of APIs to Riverbed’s performance products to access configuration and data. Create an open community to share and leverage work done around the world, inside and outside Riverbed, in creating new ideas for utilizing a performance platform.



Here are two examples of what programmability could achieve across the Riverbed Performance Platform:

1. A particular user commonly complains about poor performance when accessing the web-based ERP portal. So when that particular user accesses the system, trigger a packet capture in the branch office on the Steelhead appliance. Upon completion of the packet capture, transfer the data to Cascade to be analyzed and matched against other voice calls. Use behavioral analysis to determine if there is a significant difference in performance. If there is, then determine changes to the optimization profile or QOS profile and alert the administrator of the situation. Allow the admin to approve the changes, and if accepted, then implement those changes within the WAN optimization or ADC infrastructure.

2. Allow customers to inject new functionality across a distributed application infrastructure. For example, customers may

wish to temporarily change all images on a website or intranet portal. Instead of recoding all of the applications, provide the ability to intercept user requests and in real-time adjust or change images to meet short-term requirements, furthermore, optimize the images based on the users' viewing platform: pc, tablet, or phone.

These are just two examples of how programmability may be used to solve the 'long tail' of unique use cases or isolated requests that IT teams must solve for the business. And some customers may simply want to leverage these programmability concepts to tie general management of these products into an existing system management interface. In all cases, Riverbed aims to achieve customers' goals through a set of consistent REST-based interfaces that allows access to the functionality and the configuration settings that users would typically go to the Web-based interface or the CLI to access. REST-based programmability would be tied to a scripting language to give users new flexibility to achieve a broad set of goals. In addition to those ideas outlined above, it would give customers a way to unify operations in hybrid cloud environments, where applications may be deployed in private clouds, public clouds, or even spread across the two. Riverbed and its tens of thousands of customers would provide an instant, global community of performance oriented experts who could share scripts and show others how to leverage the extended power of the Riverbed Performance Platform.

Conclusion In the increasingly global, increasingly complex, ever-accelerating business environments that enterprises operate in today, performance matters more than ever. Customers are looking to drive more out of their existing IT infrastructure while trying to build unique differentiation for business operations with their system implementation. Riverbed has a focused vision to help customers achieve this. We recognize that customers have already invested in core networking, core applications, and core storage. We provide a performance platform that sits on top of those components to provide greater performance, insight to application challenges, and the mechanisms to control infrastructure and data that drive greater productivity, reduce risk, and improve cost efficiency of IT infrastructure. With our programmable approach to performance, we can further empower our customers to address unique use cases and simplify the management of their complex infrastructure. With Riverbed’s Performance Platform approach, there are now many new opportunities to accelerate user flow and leverage fluid data centers to support the business goals of the enterprise.

About Riverbed Riverbed delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com.

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