May 21, 2009

Notes from Interop '09: Speaking the Testing Truth with Riverbed

by Kyle Flaherty

Day two of Interop and the crowd seemingly grew larger, in fact there was a significant wait to get onto the show floor during the morning. Reminded me of people camped out the day after Thanksgiving for sales at the local mall, but with a bit less pushing and shoving. While sipping my coffee and waiting my turn through the glare of security I was reviewing the questions I wanted to ask my first interview of the day, Apurva Davè, Senior Director of Product Marketing of Riverbed.

Fortunately for me, Apurva kicked off the conversation by talking about testing with stateful applications; mentioning Oracle, CIFS, and others. A topic I could discuss all day. Our conversation moved into what Riverbed is bringing to the WAN optimization market and after our 30 minutes were up it all naturally came back around to realistic testing.

WAN optimization seems to be another one of those "buzz words" of late and Apurva knows why...the economy. Companies are ordering their IT staff to cut costs or potentially have their own jobs cut. In the same breath they are also being asked to provide better overall bandwidth optimization, better application performance and tighter security. According to Apurva, WAN optimization has become one project that companies can undertake to save money relatively quickly, but also help with optimizing bandwidth and overall performance.

"WAN optimization provides two key elements for companies. First are fewer physical appliances and second is more virtualized data control. We understand that some stuff, DNS, firewalls, etc. must stay local. But very quickly you can use WAN optimization to cut costs and optimize bandwidth."

Riverbed's Steelhead Applicances run VMware, allowing their users to place a virtualized instance of nearly anything on the appliance for use in the WAN. Additionally, the company has created strategic partnerships with vendors such as Checkpoint and Microsoft to prepackage certain products directly on the Steelhead appliance. Ultimately, hower, it is up to the user to determine how they want to use WAN optimization with the Riverbed appliance. This can lead to very clever uses of the product. One example Apurva shared involved a customer who needed to send data to a remote ship. Because of the volume of data, traditional FTP would take up to 36 hours to transfer. This company had gotten to the point where they were flying a hard drive out to the ship via helicopter! However, since they deployed the Riverbed product, they can now complete the transfer in a matter of minutes.

While, WAN optimization boasts a number of benefits, it does have it's limitations. One of the myths in the world of WAN optimization is that it can help with packet loss, but Apurva actually thinks that is not true.

"WAN optimization can help mitigate the evidence of packet loss, but not help you eliminate it...WAN optimization can't help with a bad connector or something of that sort. We can help recover the packet quickly, however, since we are TCP based and you can turn on features that allow for faster high-speed TCP."

The TCP conversation was interesting since Riverbed has a firm footing in TCP and UDP, while most of their competitors seem to lean more heavily towards UDP. As we started to talk about TCP the concept of applications naturally came into the conversation and we started to examine testing once again. When it comes to testing the Riverbed appliance, Apurva believes in a three-phased philosophy:

Test the speed
Test the scalability
Test the simplicity of integration

And, test with realistic applications, as we discussed above. Because of the nature of the product and its uses, it makes sense for Riverbed customers to evaluate the product in their own environment before they actually make a decision, this way they can see the direct benefits they are going to receive from WAN optimization in a multi-site live network. Or as Apurva stated "use the real network". The belief is that there is no better way to get budget approval than to actually show real benefits. But, as we know, this is dependent on realistic testing of the product before it reaches the customer.

"Use the real network" is the best way for companies to determine the benefits of WAN optimization and emulating a real network is the only way to truly test any network equipment before it gets into the customer's hands.