Riverbed introduces new SteelHead 90 network acceleration appliances – News

Riverbed Technology LLC today introduced a new line of hardware appliances designed to speed up enterprise networks.

The SteelHead 90 series, as the product family is called, comprises four devices. They’re powered by an operating system called RiOS 10. It uses Intel Corp.’s TDX virtual machine isolation technology to secure sensitive data.

Redwood City, California-based Riverbed counts 95 of the companies on the Fortune 100 list as customers. It sells an observability platform that developers can use to troubleshoot applications. Additionally, it offers network hardware and software under the SteelHead brand. The new appliances that debuted today extend that product portfolio’s capabilities.

Riverbed’s SteelHead appliances can be attached to a network to increase the speed at which data travels between servers. The appliances boost throughput by compressing information before it’s transmitted. Compressing a dataset lowers its bandwidth requirements, which in turn reduces the amount of time required to send it over the network.

There are four appliances in the new SteelHead 90 series. The most capable system, the SteelHead 8090, can move up to 60 gigabits of data per second. The three other devices in the lineup can manage up to 20 gigabits per second.

The devices are powered by RiOS 10, a new version of the operating system that powers Riverbed’s SteelHead appliance family. It includes performance optimizations designed to boost network speeds. There are also new cybersecurity features that enable RiOS 10 to more effectively protect sensitive data such as encryption keys from hackers.

The cybersecurity features are powered by a technology called TDX that Intel ships with some of its processors. TDX can keep applications’ sensitive data in a virtual machine that is isolated from the underlying operating system, the hypervisor and other virtual machines on the same system. This isolation makes it more difficult for malware to access the data inside.

Riverbed offers its physical SteelHead appliances alongside a cloud edition called SteelHead Cloud. It’s designed to speed up network speeds in infrastructure-as-a-service environments. In conjunction with the new SteelHead 90 appliances, Riverbed today debuted an enhanced version of SteelHead Cloud that uses RiOS 10 and can move data at a rate of up to 20 gigabits per second in cloud environments.

The company is rolling out the update alongside a new software product called SteelHead RS. According to Riverbed, it allows companies to store backup copies of important files on edge computing devices. If the data center where the original copy is kept goes offline, the lost information can be stored from the backups.

SteelHead RS and the SteelHead 8090, the most advanced of the appliances Riverbed debuted today, will become available later this year. The three other appliances are set to launch in the fourth quarter. 

Photo: Riverbed