CloudSwitch, Riverbed Partner To Optimize Cloud Applications
CloudSwitch's support for Riverbed's Cloud Steelhead, the cloud-ready version of its popular Steelhead WAN optimization appliance, counters latency issues inherent when legacy applications are moved to the cloud, the two companies said.
"It was very obvious that network bandwidth was going to be a bottleneck and a concern," said Ellen Rubin, founder and vice president of products for Burlington, Mass.-based CloudSwitch.
By partnering up, the duo seeks to alleviate those hang-ups and extend optimization to the cloud.
CloudSwtich makes the CloudSwitch Enterprise software appliance that installs into VMware and Xen environments and enables enterprises to move applications into the cloud and manage them with the same tools used to manage on-premise applications, essentially giving the appearance that the cloud applications are still running locally in the data center.
San Francisco-based Riverbed has made a major splash with its WAN acceleration and optimization offerings. Riverbed has made massive cloud push of late with its Cloud Steelhead, which makes public cloud an extension of the data center. Cloud Steelhead can cut the performance barriers like latency and bandwidth constraints in the cloud with a subscription pricing model.
Through the partnership, Riverbed Steelhead can now be found as a supported appliance in CloudSwitch's management interface.
Leveraging CloudSwitch and Riverbed together, users can now launch the Cloud Steelhead appliance in the Amazon EC2 and Terremark clouds through a point-and-click environment; automatically integrate Cloud Steelhead with on-premise Riverbed infrastructure for optimized network performance; and ensure full isolation and encryption of all cloud applications, networks and data in the cloud.
Combined, the CloudSwitch-Riverbed play lets users customize their network performance for file access, data movement and application connectivity between cloud resources and internal data centers or private clouds.
"The combination of these two things creates simplicity, ease of use and ease of management," said Joe Ghory, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Riverbed Technology.