Riverbed releases gigabit-speed WAN optimizer

The new appliance, the Steelhead 7050-L (low) and 7050-M (medium), are the first to use solid-state drives (SSD) instead of hard disk drives and offer larger memory configurations -- 32GB/48GB of memory -- than previous models. The appliances are aimed at backup consolidation for disaster recovery and business continuity.

"This is the first WAN optimization product built on SSD, which enables faster read/write speeds," said Nik Roudam, director of product marketing at Riverbed.

The appliances also support 10Gbit/sec. Ethernet for appliance clustering or for fail-over purposes. Up to 25 appliances can be clustered together for a total of 12GB/sec. throughput, according to Roudam.

The Steelhead 7050-L and 7050-M can be configured with 14 or 28 160GB SSD drives respectively, and two hard disk drives, which act as logging disks.

According to Roudam, the new appliances are aimed at data center consolidation, affording greater bandwidth for large-scale backups from multiple host systems. The 7050-L offers 75,000 host system connections, and the 7050-M offers 100,000 connections, or a maximum of 20,000 users all backing up through a single appliance.