| Next Steps: |
Overview
The New Distributed Enterprise
Data center consolidation and server centralization are two top IT initiatives driven by the need to save money on hardware and software costs, as well as minimizing the IT operating expenses of the distributed enterprise. In addition, the accelerated adoption of virtualization technologies has now made cloud computing a viable and increasingly compelling option for many enterprises (public, private, and hybrid).
Along with this trend towards the "virtual data center," it’s no longer practical or affordable to simply backhaul all branch office traffic back to a central data center via dedicated WAN circuits and leased lines. Branch offices are rapidly adopting lower-cost, reliable direct Internet connections to access their data center and cloud-based services. The challenge is then ensuring this new distributed network architecture delivers the same or greater level of availability, performance, and security as before.
The McAfee-Riverbed Joint Solution
To solve these challenges, McAfee and Riverbed have partnered to deliver best-of-breed WAN optimization and branch office security solutions on a single device — the Riverbed Steelhead Appliance. McAfee offers two unique solutions for Riverbed Steelhead appliances:
- McAfee Web Gateway for Riverbed
- McAfee Vulnerability Manager
These solutions take advantage of both companies' market-leading technologies, while addressing the challenges associated with increasing branch office application performance and security.
These McAfee software packages run on the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), a virtualized, extensible data services platform that allows customers to deploy best-of-breed edge services without requiring dedicated servers as virtual appliances. Customers can deploy these virtual appliances directly on Steelhead products to further minimize the hardware infrastructure footprint at the branch office and reduce operational overhead.
Riverbed customers can secure their branch office while reducing their IT footprint. To effectively protect global offices, McAfee provides enterprise-class security that Riverbed customers can trust.
About Riverbed
Riverbed Technology is the IT performance company. The Riverbed family of wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions liberates businesses from common IT constraints by increasing application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility — all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage, or servers. Thousands of companies with distributed operations use Riverbed to make their IT infrastructure faster, less expensive, and more responsive.