Riverbed Evolves Its Steelhead Product Family To Better Address the Performance and Consolidation Needs of Global Organizations

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) February 13, 2012 -- February 13, 2012

Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT performance company, announced that it is evolving its Steelhead®product family, which is used by thousands of global organizations to accelerate the performance of applications over the wide area network (WAN). The company that pioneered the WAN optimization market is introducing two new product series, SteelheadCX and Steelhead EX.The product families allow organizations to meet their top IT performance priorities, from accelerating application performance worldwide to completelyconsolidating remote office infrastructure into the data center.

The Steelhead product family is powered by the Riverbed Operating System (RiOS®) software. RiOS on the new appliances delivers the broadest set of optimizations available on platforms that are both easy to install and manage and provide industry-leading price/performance, allowing organizations to get more from their WAN optimization solution than ever before.

Steelhead CX Series – Dedicated WAN Optimization Appliances

The Steelhead CX series, like its predecessors in the xx50 series, overcomes bandwidth and geographic limitations to make users more productive, data transfers faster, and applications perform seamlessly regardless of location. However, the Steelhead CX series of appliances offers more capacity and throughput than previous Steelhead appliances at the same total cost of ownership.

Steelhead EX Series – Multi-function, Enterprise-class Branch Office Appliance
The Steelhead EX builds on Riverbed’s award-winning WAN optimization solution, and adds to that a robust platform withmore memory, disk, and CPU to support the Virtual Services Platform (VSP) and Granite, which was introduced today. And, every appliance in the Steelhead EX series is supported by high-performance solid state drives (SSDs).

Branch Office Consolidation: Every Steelhead EX appliance features the VSP, similar to the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) that runs on the xx50 series, which has a dedicated platform that runs virtual services and enables greater consolidation in branch offices. With the VSP, each appliance is designed to leverage VMware virtualization technologyto run virtualized instances of an organization’s own services, including DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, print serving, streaming media, security service or 3rd party software.

Remote Server and Storage Consolidation to the Data Center: The Steelhead EX series can also be upgraded to include Riverbed GraniteTM.This revolutionary new product enables a new architectural approach called edge virtual server infrastructure (edge-VSI) that does for edge servers what virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) did for desktops: it allows IT to consolidate and manage all edge servers in the data center. But unlike VDI, edge-VSI does this while delivering 20-50% lowertotal cost of ownership (TCO).

With Granite, global enterprises can achieve complete consolidation of edge applications, servers and storage to the data center, while delivering services to the edge of the enterprise as if they were local. Edge-VSI is complementary to WAN optimization, accelerating performance for applications and use cases not addressed by any WAN optimization approach today.Organizations that deploy Granite are expected to save up to 50% over traditional approaches to managing distributed infrastructure by eliminating costly backup and recovery processes in remote locations, consolidating underutilized edge servers and storage, and cutting many of the general IT administration costs including travel associated with managing infrastructure at the edge.

Availability
Steelhead-CX and Steelhead-EX series are expected to begenerally available this quarter.