Web application acceleration and WAN bandwidth optimisation specialist Riverbed Technology Inc is working on ways of bringing LAN-like performance to applications accessed from the public cloud.
The company already claims to be helping many of its customers consolidate files and applications to the data centre private cloud in ways that do not impact on end-user performance.
Others are using the company’s appliances to accelerate replication and seamless access to secondary clouds when needed.
It is now also well positioned to help organisations when they want to make the move from the private cloud to the public cloud, Bob Gilbert Director of Marketing at Riverbed told us.
“The public cloud has become a hot topic, and we have been hearing lots about software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-service, and so on. We think there’s one that’s missing, and that is optimisation-as-a-service.”
There’s great value to be got from cloud Gilbert agrees, but he contends that there are issues of performance that will need to dealt with if the public cloud is to really take off.
He said the company had run tests which showed that moving access to some applications from the LAN to a public cloud could lead to a 20-fold deterioration in some key performance characteristics. He cited one example of logging onto SharePoint and uploading or downloading a 3MB document.
“On a LAN, logging into a Microsoft SharePoint repository takes around 2 seconds whereas on a WAN link with 100 ms latency it could take up to 23 seconds.” Organisations are rightly interested in hosting these very kind of applications and performance is critical, but that’s indicative of the sort of hit you could encounter with raw cloud, he argued.
The sort of software sold by Riverbed, Blue Coat and Cisco is used to solve these issues, by accelerating the performance of applications across the WAN infrastructure.
The proposition being made by Riverbed is that it can also be applied to optimise the infrastructure of a public cloud.
“We have a very portable acceleration infrastructure which can be deployed at the data centre, at the branch office and on the laptops of mobile workers. There is no reason we can’t take our Steelhead appliance footprint and move it into the Microsoft Azure cloud or onto Amazon’s S3 public cloud.”
He said the company could soon be working with public cloud service providers on ways to run a virtual instance of the Riverbed appliance, and provide that as a cloud optimisation service. “It would be a relatively seamless step for our architecture.”
Gilbert said the company had a prototype running at Amazon, and was working internally on its own cloud initiative. The capability is there he said, and acceleration services for the public cloud would become available at a timeframe that is as yet to be finalised.
