Riverbed Technology

Infobox Company | company_
company_name = Riverbed Technology, Inc
company_type = Public (nasdaq|RVBD)
foundation = 2002
location_city = flagicon|U.S. San Francisco, California
location_country = USA
area_served = Worldwide

key_people =
Jerry Kennelly (CEO)
Steve McCanne (CTO)
Eric Wolford (SVP Marketing and Business Development)
Randy S. Gottfried (CFO)
David M. Peranich (SVP Worldwide Sales)
Gordon Chaffee (VP of Engineering)
Stephen R. Smoot (VP of of Technical Operations)

industry = Networking hardware
homepage = [http://www.riverbed.com/ www.riverbed.com]

Riverbed Technology, Inc. is an American Technology corporation that designs and manufactures wide area data services (WDS) appliances.

Riverbed Technology's world headquarters is located in San Francisco, California.

Riverbed develops infrastructure appliances to attempt to improve the performance of client-server interactions over WANs without breaking the semantics of the protocols, file systems or applications. Actions it try to speed up are for example copying a file from a distant file server, getting mail from a remote Exchange server, backing up remote file servers to a main datacenter, or sending a very large CAD file to a colleague in another office.

One of the goals of Wide Area Data Services is to optimize the performance of any TCP-based application operating in a wide area network (WAN) environment. That degree of improvement can enable customers to centralize currently distributed resources like storage, mail servers, and file servers. Wide area networks are computer networks that cover a broad area that cross any regional or national boundary. Physical limitations in networks often result in network speeds being much lower that those of non-WAN networks. Riverbed aims to reduce the effect of inherent network latencies by using a combination of optimization techniques such as caching, compressing and protocol spoofing.

Riverbed has developed a software-based appliance solution that addresses both the bandwidth problem as well as the latency problem. The product is called the Steelhead appliance; it is a Linux-based appliance deployed in the network infrastructure at both client side (typically remote offices) and server side (typically a data center or other major facility).

The Steelhead appliance is a transport-level TCP Proxy server that conceptually operates in pair-wise configurations, with a Steelhead appliance situated near one or more servers (the “server site”) and another situated near clients (the “client site”). Though Steelhead appliances communicate with one another in a paired fashion, the architecture allows them to be clustered and meshed across the WAN, as any Steelhead appliance can communicate directly with any other, so that a server-side Steelhead appliance can communicate with “n” client-side Steelhead appliances.

Steelhead appliances intercept client-server connections without interfering in the normal client-server interactions, file semantics, or protocols. All client requests are passed through to the server normally, yet relevant traffic is optimized to improve performance. With this approach, Steelhead appliances can be easily introduced into an enterprise environment without requiring any significant changes to the network or architecture.

Riverbed's main competitors are public companies Cisco, Juniper Networks, Packeteer, Expand Networks, Tacit Networks, Availl, and Silver Peak Systems.