Riverbed is turning to Solid State Drives to increase the speed of their WAN acceleration products. The two new Steelhead 7050 models can deliver up to 1 Gbps of WAN capacity for data center workloads, and 622 Mbps for remote office scenario’s; the previous-generation 6050 maxed out at 310 Mbps.
The 7050 comes in two flavors. Both use 160GB SSDs to cache data; the 7050-L has 14 drives, and the 7050-M has 28 of them. This enables the L model to support up to 75.000 connections, while the M series maxes out at 100.000 connections. Riverbed is obviously pleased with the new products:
“As our customers are enhancing their data center capabilities and building out private cloud environments, they are increasingly dependent on their network for everything from branch office computing to large-scale disaster recovery processes. We are committed to breaking down performance barriers within enterprises’ current network infrastructure and keeping it reliable, inexpensive and simple,” said Apurva Davé, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed. “With the release of Steelhead 7050, distributed enterprises can ensure that IT performance is not a limiting factor in DR efforts or instantaneous access to business-critical applications.”
The units have 1 Gbps WAN uplinks, and 10 Gbps internal connections; the latter can be used to build a cluster of up to 25 Steelhead appliances. The maximum speed for such a cluster is quoted as 12 Gbps of WAN capacity and 1.000.000 connections. Typical performance improvements reached are between 60 and 95%, so this should be enough bandwidth for 99% of all workloads I can think of.
Both units will be available later this quarter. According to Computerworld, the 7050-L will retail for $180.000, and the 7050-M will cost $235.000.
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