Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, today announced a partnership with Check Point(R) Software Technologies (NASDAQ: CHKP) to provide enterprise customers a single solution that combines Riverbed award-winning WAN optimization technology with Check Point’s leading security software. The joint solution will help companies protect and safeguard networks at remote and branch offices through a unique virtualized environment.The partnership takes advantage of the complementary capabilities of the two companies’ technologies. The Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), a virtualized, extensible data services platform, allows customers to deploy best-of-breed edge services. Check Point Security Gateway R70(TM) provides customers a comprehensive set of centrally managed best-in-class security protections. Through Check Point’s unique Software Blade architecture, customers can select the exact security protections they need for an environment, including firewall, VPN, intrusion prevention, antivirus, anti-spyware, URL filtering, Web security, anti-spam and policy management software blades. Customers can deploy virtual appliances, such as Security Gateway R70, directly on Riverbed(R) Steelhead(R) appliances to minimize complexity at the branch office and reduce costs and operational overhead.

“As a cost savings measure, many enterprises are looking to execute on IT consolidation initiatives. The RSP allows enterprises to streamline IT resources while lowering operational and capital costs,” said Alan Saldich, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed. “By combining these business-critical services — from Check Point and Riverbed — in one solution at the branch, enterprises are able to take advantage of superior security and acceleration, while lowering operational costs.”

“The cooperation between Check Point and Riverbed brings customers WAN optimization together with robust security, all in a single solution,” said Amnon Bar-Lev, vice president of field operations at Check Point. “Check Point Security Gateway R70 on Riverbed’s Steelhead appliance is a creative approach that leverages virtualization technology and adds to it Check Point’s renowned security capabilities.”

Running on the RSP will offer customers the combination of Check Point’s market-leading security and the core Riverbed acceleration functionality within a single hardware platform — the Steelhead appliance. Using the RSP, customers can deliver virtualized edge services for branch offices that are both best-of-breed and cost-effective.

Based on Check Point’s new Software Blade architecture, Check Point Security Gateway R70 provides businesses with flexible security. The Software Blade architecture empowers businesses with the ability to select the exact security applications or “software blades” they need from a library of over 20 software blades. New software blades can be added without deploying new hardware, reducing deployment times and operational costs.

“Consolidation at the branch is a top priority for enterprises as they look to implement cost-cutting initiatives. Enterprises, however, are challenged with keeping their IT infrastructure secure and their workforces efficient, while eliminating costs across the organization,” said Jon Oltsik, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “The partnership between Check Point Software and Riverbed provides a solution to these challenges by providing best-of-breed security and WAN optimization on one virtualized platform. By taking advantage of the virtualized platform, organizations can eliminate operational costs without compromising the performance or security of their IT infrastructure.”

“The relationship between Riverbed and Microsoft continues to grow. We are able to innovate and provide enterprises with solutions that accelerate the performance of their Microsoft environments,” said Julius Sinkevicius, director Windows Server Marketing at Microsoft. “Having the support of Riverbed is crucial to the success of our branch office strategy. We’re both committed to working jointly to provide our customers with a comprehensive WAN optimization offering by joining complementary solutions.”

Microsoft introduced a feature, BranchCache, which is intended to improve performance for Windows 7 users accessing file and Web applications hosted on Windows Server 2008 R2 servers over the WAN. Riverbed enables the deployment of Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 on Steelhead(R) appliances with the RSP. Customers currently deploy Windows Server on the RSP to consolidate services at the branch to further cut costs, including Active Directory, DNS/DHCP, Media Streaming and Print Services. When Windows Server 2008 R2 is released, it can be deployed on the RSP and the BranchCache feature is a service that enterprises can use on the deployed Windows Server.

“As enterprises move to Windows 7, they may find a place for BranchCache on the Steelhead appliance,” said Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president, Yankee Group. “It is apparent that Riverbed has been working with Microsoft on a broad vision and in-depth technology integration that will benefit their joint customers. This strategy positions Riverbed to continue to be a market and technology leader in the WAN optimization market.”

“We’ve worked closely with Microsoft on technology integration through the POLP program and the integration of Windows Server on the RSP. Supporting Microsoft’s latest innovations is a natural next step in our relationship,” said John Martin, vice president of product management, Riverbed. “By working with Microsoft we’ve been able to expand on our core value to customers — providing the best acceleration across the broadest set of applications. In branch office environments the combination of Riverbed and Microsoft will provide enterprises with a comprehensive, optimized IT environment.”

The RSP is an extensible virtualized data services platform that allows customers to deploy best-of-breed edge services that formerly required 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, which reduces costs in operational overhead.

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Because Paglo can treat the IT information as unstructured, you can use IT search to find relationships between data from different components. You see, structured information works well when the problems to be solved are known. But as we know, this isn’t usually the case when you’re troubleshooting. That’s why you need to be able to use simple, natural-language searches, just like you do today with your favorite search engine.

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Once you’re up and running you can then use your Paglo Web account to query the data in your Search Index. Is it important to you to keep track of available disk space on servers and desktops? Run a search to discover that. Type a query yourself, use a previously saved search, or even run a shared search (Paglo share-it) published in the Paglo community. Display the results as a chart, list, or graph and create a custom Dashboard to monitor the free disk space. Your Dashboard continuously self-updates as the Crawler uploads fresh data so whenever you visit the Dashboard you’ll immediately see the state of free disk space on your network. Turn your Dashboard view into a virtual NOC where you can check the status of the issues you consider most important to monitor.

Paglo makes IT search easy. Run and build your own queries and Dashboards, or start with a share-it published in the Paglo community. You may benefit from creating one for ops, one for network management, and one for security. Don’t worry, you can save as many Dashboards as you like. You also can take advantage of applications (like the Paglo Inventory Application and Alerting Application) that we provide.

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Alright, this is the Wide Optimization chalk talk. My name is Apurva. I’m from Riverbed Technology. You’re probably already wondering what the heck is WAN acceleration anyway. What your business buys have realized just yet is that your whole business today depends on your network and the applications that run across it.

Headquarters. It’s always been there. It’s always going to be there. But that’s not where most of the action is happening nowadays. Nowadays you have the ever present ubiquitous branch office. It’s in Singapore, it’s in Malaysia, it’s in London. It’s wherever you need to be in order to get the job done for your customers. And let’s face it, headquarters and the branch office, they’re not off in their own separate worlds or, oh, wait a minute, they are. At least today they are.

Now in truth people have connected these locations via wide area network. The wide area network may be satellite, maybe a typical land line. It could be a new fancy MPLS network, the best in class. But it sure doesn’t seem like the headquarters and the branch office works together today efficiently. What are some of the problems we have?

Let’s face it, the biggest problem we have is speed. It’s really slow to get any type of application or data across the network today. So what do people do? They take a small amount of band width and they spend a lot of money and buy more band width. Does that really solve the problem? Sometimes.

What else is going on here? Well, the IT guys who are responsible for making sure that this branch office can talk to the headquarters says, well, we have a server over here, we’ve got email over here. Why don’t we put those systems out over here. That seems like a pretty good idea cause now they’ve got their own server and their own email, that must be pretty fast. It’s true. That is pretty fast, right? You’ve got local performance. But guess what? These branch office employees still need to talk to the headquarters. So what else do you do to try and improve the performance of your network and your applications today?

Well, there were a bunch of other systems and tools that you could use in order to try and improve it. Number one is a cashing system. It’s basically making copies of files. You might also use a QOS or Quality of Service system, could be separate, could be built into your routers. It kind of all depends on how your network is structured. But let’s face it, what all of this does is add a lot of complexity to what should be a relatively simple problem.

You’ve got an office here and an office here and they should be connected together with a WAN, right? Right. So how do we get back to basics, how do we get back to simplicity and say we want our employees no matter where they are in the world to be able to communicate, to be able to collaborate, to make all of our offices work like one office. That’s the idea of WAN optimization technology. So let’s start talking about WAN acceleration, what it is and how it solves this problem.

Without getting too technical in terms of definitions and theories and so on and so forth, wide area data services is a combination of application, storage and networking technology that let you do a few things. With wide area data services applications can go up to 100 times faster and at the same time band width use is reduced by 60 to 95%. Those are some pretty big claims. Let’s get into the technology and see how it actually works.

True wide area data services solutions are appliance-based hardware-software combined models that sit both at the branch office and at the data center. By sitting in both places they see all of the data that moves across your network and they understand the key protocols used across the network. So here they can do two important things. With a WAN accelerator solution in place we start to see a few things happen across the wide area network that didn’t happen before.

First of all, let’s think about the data as it’s typically moving across your network. You’ve got a user over here. Let’s draw in a user. And that user is requesting data. They’re requesting files, they’re accessing applications. It doesn’t matter if they’re web-based applications, if they’re typical Microsoft Office applications, if they’re email attachments, whatever. They’re requesting that across the network.

The typical thing that happens in your network is a ping pong affect or a chatty application protocol which requires many round trips in order to send that information back and forth. What does this mean? Let me put it into a few numbers that probably make sense for you.

Imagine requesting a 10 meg word document across a wide area network. Hey, that’s not so big nowadays. If you were doing that from the U.S. to, say, London, that could take over 31 minutes. Why? Well, most people would say it’s that first problem we laid out. It’s that wide area network bandwidth. It’s just not enough. But the truth is, even if you had plenty of band width, this problem, the chatty application protocol, would still limit the performance of that application significantly.

So you have to address both the issue of band width constraints in the wide area network as well as the issues of the application and transport protocols and how they send information back and forth if you want to improve performance of the wide area network.

Let’s face it, all of these WAN optimizers, these cashing and QOS and compression accelerators, they’re all trying to do the same thing but they’re taking a really narrow approach. If you don’t address all of these issues at the same time, how can you really guarantee that you’re going to improve the performance for your end users? You can’t. So let’s erase this and let’s make our applications perform the way we want them to perform.

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Man 1: Right.

Man 2: And I want to clear up something though because often we think the reason we optimize and do this type of thing is so we can improve the user experience that’s not at the data center, right?

So the idea the better we get at this allows us to centralize more applications, so it begins to sound like we centralize everything, but obviously you can’t centralize everything, right?

Man 1: Right.

Man 2: This is where we start looking at other technologies.

Man 3: And Davis 4.1 introduces another feature, what we call the virtual blade. So now the story is complete. With WAAS 4.1, you can centralize everything you can and you could virtualize at the branch what you must.

Users may need a local to main controller. They definitely need a DHP server. They need a DNS server. They need a local print server. Well, with WAAS and Windows server on Cisco WAAS, we can now provide all of these locally while centrally managed.

Man 4: Let’s go to the lab.

Man 2: I want to see how this works. Can we go to your lab?

Man 3: Bear with me real quick. Before we kind of get started on this gnome, I definitely want to make sure that the folks actually get a chance to see the products and stuff. So on the desk here we actually have a 274 in the rack.

I also want to give a shout out to the folks at ABC that actually give us this really cool rack for the set.

Man 1: I love that rack.

Man 3: This rack is the stuff.

Man 1: That rack rocks!

Man 3: I love this rack. Anyway I know we’re not talking about this on the show, but man, I could really get into it. Then we also have, rack mounted in here, we have the 474 and the 574 as well. What are the differences between the two?

Man 4: These are three new appliances that we are introducing next week. They are not WAE’s, White Area Application Engines. They’re actually WAVE, waves. They are White Area Virtualization Engines. They allow you to run both WAAS and Virtual Blades on the same box.

Man 3: That’s pretty cool.

Man 4: The idea here is that I go with one of these boxes into a branch office and I could replace older equipment, older servers and what not and put one device. Get one service contract from Microsoft and Cisco to provide this box. Get Cisco to provide me Level I and Level II support for the Microsoft installation and obviously Level III support for everything else Cisco.

Man 1: So with the exception of a switch, all you have at the branch potentially is just your router and your WAVE device.

Man 4: And a WAVE device.

Man 3: Wait a minute, though, because you said something pretty important that’s important for folks at a branch office because these branch offices are way out everywhere. So I can call Cisco and get support on the Microsoft stuff inside here?

Man 4: Absolutely. So this hardware is certified under Microsoft’s program, and when you run Microsoft services on it, you don’t have to duplicate the issue if it happens on a real hardware.

Man 3: So me how it works man. This is too cool.

Man 4: All right.

Man 3: That’s pretty slick.

Man 1: So as we said before we also revamped the GUI. When you log into the GUI, it is now set in drawers with different actions, different drawers for different tasks. OK? You get obviously immediately a view of your network. You could see traffic mix. You could see reduction volume. You can do applications.

You can actually customize this GUI and you could use what we call RDOC, roll based access control, to actually limit users to do different things. So I can create a Virtual Blade, for example.

Man 4: I could become a revenue center for the apartment.

Man 3: Yeah, almost.

Man 4: You need a little more access?

Man 3: It’s almost like a built-in package center.

Man 4: Right. So you can create different roles for different users and actually separate the administration of the Virtual Blade from the network admin.

Man 3: That’s pretty cool. That’s actually really cool.

Man 4: And not only that, but it is truly a one click deployment in terms of the Virtual Blade. Let me show you.

Man 3: There’s no way.

Man 4: So here is my device. I can take a look at the device statistics. I can take a look at the health. Then I would go down to my administration page. I can see that my virtualization resources are enabled.

I can now go to Virtual Blades. I have already one Virtual Blade running, but I’m going to create a new one. I’m going to give it a number. I’m going to give it a description: tech wise. TV-1.

Man 1: Every customer calls it that.

Man 4: Yeah, why not? I’m going to auto start it. I’m going to tell it the image is on disc, and for that, I’m just going to take a look really quickly here on #2 and basically copy the same one so I don’t forget where it is.

Man 3: This image is stored on this Blade from the factory?

Man 4: Exactly right. So if you order the WAVE with WAAS, the VB license and WOW, what we call Windows server on WAAS, you get it all prepackaged and it’s all ready to go.

Basically all you have to do is provision the Virtual Blade and I’m going to give it 30 gig of disc and I’m going to give it one gig of RAM which is plenty, and I’m going to add a network interface. I’m just going to call it Net-1.

I’m going to generate a Mac address. Now this Mac address is unique for this set up, so the central manager has a pre-allocated pool for this prefix and just generates the last three octytes, so these are MAC addresses unique for this deployment. Guarantees from MAC duplication, right? I’m going to edit and I’m going to submit.

Man 1: I thought we were going to have a WAVE when we deployed these.

Man 3: Well, that would have been kind of cool wouldn’t it?

Man 4: That is it. Now I can take a look and see here my Virtual Blade. Now I’m going to go to actions. Actions allows me now to look at my configuration. So it tells me: here is my overall configuration for Virtual Blades. I’ve got two gigs, one available. I’ve got two Virtual Blades; one is running, one is stopped. OK?

Man 3: That’s on David’s machine now.

Man 4: Yeah. Now I’m going to go to Virtual Blade One, and I’m going to start it. I’m going to go to pending and request and send. With that I’m going to use VNC to monitor the installation.

Within seven minutes, I’ll have my installation complete. We don’t have to wait. As I said before, I already configured one Virtual Blade and it’s running.

Man 3: OK, so do you have a baked image here?

Man 4: I do have a baked image. I have an image that I installed last night. It is Windows server 2008 standard core edition. It’s GUI-less, and as such, it provides you some benefits such as higher security or less of an attack surface because of no GUI, no applications running on top of it.

It is managed through a CLI with different set up scripts that some of them will be supplied pro-bono from Cisco and others will be supplied by Advanced Services. So if you get engaged with Advanced Services, part of the added value are going to be some heavy duty set up scripts for the core server.

Man 3: That’s cool! That’s awesome!

Man 4: As I said, less surface attack, less patching. It is managed remotely through either MMC, Microsoft Management Console, from the user desk top or some of the other more sophisticated management tools that Microsoft has. Server Management and Configuration Management Servers and stuff like …