Riverbed Introduces New Platform for "Application Delivery

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - May 7, 2013) - Riverbed Technology ( NASDAQ : RVBD ), the application performance company, today announced an industry game-changer -- a new platform enabling any customer to deliver application delivery controller-as-a-service (ADCaaS) with the Stingray® Services Controller. This new product will automate the deployment of application delivery services for any network architecture including software defined networking (SDN).

Typically, ADCs have been deployed in a network-centric model of "one application per ADC box" or where a shared ADC infrastructure must support the demands of multiple applications. With the Stingray Services Controller, Riverbed makes possible an "ADC per application" deployment model. This directly addresses the evolving application and data center architectures, workflows, and operations models that call for a next generation ADC architecture that can remove today's bottlenecks, delivering improved agility, high levels of automation, and quicker time-to-service. Riverbed's ADCaaS enabling technology now gives cloud providers and enterprises deploying in the private cloud the ability to provision, scale, and deploy their ADC as needed. 

"Riverbed's Stingray Services Controller and the Joyent high-performance cloud will enable our customers to provision, license, and scale ADC services in a very easy, agile, and cost effective way," said Jason Hoffman, founder and chief technology officer, Joyent. "This ground-breaking, high-performance approach maps to our DNA and will enable us to deploy and manage ADCs in a truly elastic cloud delivery model."

Legacy ADC Challenges The Stingray Services Controller addresses the challenges IT architects and operators face when trying to deploy traditional ADC architectures with emerging software-defined architectures and within their existing or virtualized data centers. The following list highlights some of the challenges impacting business and operations:

• Deploying ADC services takes days or months
• Inability to guarantee performance per application or tenant due to shared tenancy
• Scaling ADC operations requires pre-procuring over-capacity with bigger boxes rather than dynamically sizing in real-time
• Tedious change control processes make ADC operations time-consuming and cumbersome

Consumption Model for Elastic Scaling With the introduction of the Stingray Services Controller, enterprises and cloud providers will be able to automatically provision, deploy, license, meter, and manage their ADC inventory in an as-a-service model.

The Stingray Services Controller will also provide a new consumption model for customers deploying ADC services, called the Stingray Traffic Manager (STM) "micro" instance. These STM "micro" instances can range from small ADC instances to large Stingray instances all on commodity servers. This eliminates the traditional throughput-based ADC sizing model that forces customers to guess their traffic load and pre-procure ADC capabilities in advance. With the STM "micro" instance, ADC services can now be elastically scaled on demand and right-sized to suit each application in the data center, offering high density, full isolation, and multi-tenancy scaling.

"With the emergence of the virtualized data center, legacy ADCs can be a bottleneck and were starting to be excluded from virtualization strategies and cloud deployments," said Jeff Pancottine, senior vice president and general manager of the Riverbed Stingray application delivery business unit. "With Stingray Services Controller, customers will have a hyper-elastic ADC platform that can adapt to workload changes. This is a game changer -- today we are introducing a software-defined application delivery fabric that enables Layer 7 services on top of any data center architecture."

Availability: The Stingray Services Controller is expected to be generally available in Q3 2013.

Access to Stingray Services Controller

• Interop Las Vegas 2013: Riverbed will demonstrate its Stingray Services Controller at Interop Las Vegas booth #1351 taking place May 7 - 10 at Mandalay Bay. On May 8, conference goers can visit Riverbed's booth from 4:40 to 6 p.m. for a happy hour.
• Follow Stingray Services Controller on twitter using #RiverbedStingray
• Video describing Stingray Services Controller: http://youtu.be/FeQrxz6NDlo
• ADC-as-a-Service infographic: http://www.riverbed.com/about/document-reposi...13pdf.html
• Stingray Services Controller product brief: http://www.riverbed.com/about/document-reposi...Brief.html
• Stingray Services Controller product brochure: http://www.riverbed.com/about/document-reposi...chure.html

More than 22,000 organizations worldwide depend on Riverbed to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT infrastructure, through solutions that overcome performance issues caused by distance, distributed computing, and ever increasing amounts of data. As IT organizations embark on strategic initiatives to virtualize, consolidate and migrate workloads into cloud environments, users are moved farther from their data. Slow applications, slow file transfers and inefficient websites can negatively impact the performance and success of these initiatives. Riverbed transforms IT performance by providing solutions spanning WAN optimization, storage delivery, application-aware network performance management, application performance management, application delivery controllers, web content optimization (WCO), and cloud data protection. By providing the broadest portfolio of performance solutions that deliver anywhere, any-application optimization, Riverbed enables organizations to increase productivity and efficiency, while enhancing business resilience and controlling costs.

Additional Resources

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• Riverbed Blog
• Riverbed Community  
• Twitter  (@Riverbed)
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Forward Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to the expected demand for and benefits from Riverbed's products and services, the potential release of future products, and the capabilities of such yet to be released products. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they do not fully materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include our ability to react to trends and challenges in our business and the markets in which we operate; our ability to anticipate market needs or develop new or enhanced products to meet those needs; the adoption rate of our products; our ability to establish and maintain successful relationships with our distribution partners; our ability to compete in our industry; fluctuations in demand, sales cycles and prices for our products and services; shortages or price fluctuations in our supply chain; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; general political, economic and market conditions and events; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Riverbed's business are set forth in our Form 10-K filed with the SEC on May 3, 2013. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Any future product, feature or related specification that may be referenced in this release are for information purposes only and are not commitments to deliver any technology or enhancement. Riverbed reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time.

About Riverbed Riverbed delivers application performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed ( NASDAQ : RVBD ) is available at www.riverbed.com .

Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.