Riverbed Technology, the leader in application performance infrastructure, introduced the most powerful Riverbed® SteelHead™ appliances to date. The Riverbed CX 70 series, the first WAN optimization solution specifically designed to meet the needs of modern applications in the hybrid enterprise, offers a new hardware form factor to complement the most complete visibility, control, and optimization solution to accelerate performance of on-premises, cloud, and SaaS applications delivered with SteelHead 9.0and Riverbed® SteelCentral™ AppResponse 9.5 in November 2014. The new SteelHead CX 70 series includes a complete hardware update, including solidstate drive-based architecture, double the RAM capacity and increased processing power for great scalability and even better application performance.

The typical enterprise today is a hybrid enterprise, running on a combination of on-premises, SaaS, and cloud-based applications, and delivered over an evolving mix of private and public networks. While hybrid architectures and SaaS applications help organizations lower costs, reduce time to market, and improve end user productivity, they also create management challenges for CIOs and IT teams as they attempt to deliver an optimal and consistent end-user experience. CIOs need visibility, control, and optimization into and across all of this complexity from the source to the end user to ensure that all on-premises, cloud, and SaaS applications perform to the SLAs determined by the business.

To address these challenges, SteelHead CX 70 series can securely optimize the growing number of connections between end-users and web-based application servers. And, as IT moves away from centralized network environments and adopts more cloud infrastructures, SteelHead also provides network traffic information that improves the visibility essential to troubleshooting, fixing, and, ultimately, preempting network and application degradation, while optimizing applications and prioritizing network traffic based on business needs.

“Riverbed is best positioned to do for hybrid networks and SaaS applications what we’ve done for traditional WANs and applications running on-premises for over 10 years,” said Paul O’Farrell, Senior Vice President and General Manager, SteelHead Products Group at Riverbed. “SteelHead has always delivered unparalleled optimization to applications, and we’ve now added visibility and control across hybrid apps and hybrid networks, which are critical to enabling hybrid enterprises to achieve peak performance. Our new CX70 hardware series coupled with SteelHead 9.0 and SteelCentral AppResponse 9.5, offers the most powerful solution for IT to transform application performance into business performance.”

The new CX 70 series offers the following enhancements:

1. Up to 5x more WAN capacity for SteelHead Network Services, which include Application Flow Engine,Network QoS, Path Selection, Secure Transport and SteelFlow – the integration between SteelHead 9.0 and SteelCentral AppResponse 9.5 for complete visibility of performance metrics.
2. Rated to support 100% of optimized connections using secure socket layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) application protocols, meeting the data transport security requirements of modern day applications.
3. Greatly improved application performance and reliability with 100% solid state drive (SSD)-based architecture.