Riverbed Relaunches Network Acceleration Portfolio Armed For AI Era

The ‘most comprehensive acceleration announcement in seven years,’ according to Riverbed, includes seven new Riverbed SteelHead offerings powered by RiOS 10, the company’s next generation acceleration software engine, the company’s executives told CRN.

Riverbed is making major — and much needed — updates to the network acceleration side of its business as networks are being reconfigured in the AI world.

The “most comprehensive acceleration announcement in seven years,” according to Riverbed, includes seven new hardware and software Riverbed SteelHead offerings powered by RiOS 10, the company’s next-generation acceleration software engine, executives told CRN.

As part of the re-invigoration of the acceleration business, Riverbed is also unveiling a flexible subscription model that makes it easier and less costly for enterprises transforming their network infrastructures for the AI era, the company said.

“This is a lot in one big launch,” Riverbed’s CEO Dave Donatelli told CRN. “We’re very excited about it. It’s a very comprehensive launch of hardware, software and new operating system, new features, and a new go-to-market model as well … Since this is such a big launch, it gives [partners] a great opportunity now to go out and help their customers upgrade. They haven’t had such a big launch from us in a while, so it’s a really good refresh opportunity for them.”

[Related: Flagship Riverbed Observability Platform Receives Generative, Predictive And Agentic AI Infusion]

Riverbed has two core businesses: its longstanding acceleration business and its observability business. The company last month updated its flagship AI-powered observability platform to include generative, predictive and agentic AI features, as well as a new module for measuring unified communications (UC) performance and an expanded packet capture feature that includes visibility for packet connections outside an organization’s network. Riverbed first introduced its upgraded observability platform lastMay in a launch the company called its biggest release in years.

Donatelli said that the company purposely chose to launch the massively updated Acceleration portfolio on the 23rd anniversary of Riverbed’s founding since the company was founded around this product group.

Today, Riverbed sees AI and the increase in network capacity as driving forces for the portfolio refresh, Donatelli said.

“We’re trying to kind of tie all these things together,” he said. “What’s driving the big change is the fact that companies’ networks are changing very dramatically across what we see are two really major fields. First, of course, AI is generating huge amounts of data movement. The second thing is, even still in the traditional businesses out there, meaning your traditional applications, we’re finding that customers applying even larger network capacity still need help in getting traditional applications to run faster across those very large networks,” he said.

The latest launch is giving Riverbed customers the ability to scale up and down, while letting these companies move more and more data across their networks, especially as AI puts new demand on enterprise networks, said Mark Sollars, CTO of Riverbed partner Teneo Solutions.

“Why I’m excited about this new announcement is how [Riverbed] is really now moving with the times within the acceleration space,” Sollars said. “For the first time in a while, the amount of data that we’re seeing needing to transfer across the network has really grown [and] that makes acceleration a need again.”

The New York City-based solution provider sees Riverbed’s acceleration business refresh as an opportunity to re-engage with enterprises who have new networking needs, Sollars said.

“[We can] show them the new features, how it’s improved and can grow with them and give them more flexibility. But also, I see the ability to have more of a wider conversation with a customer … about the security of AI and enterprise applications, the visibility of enterprise applications, and the performance of those applications with this new release,” he said.

SteelHead Upgraded

Riverbed’s newly refreshed SteelHead line consists of its fleet of network optimization products that enhance application performance and user experience, particularly over WAN connections and in hybrid cloud environments. The four new SteelHead appliances include options for the data center, all the way to the edge. Options include the SteelHead 8090, offering up to 60 Gbps of data movement over optimized WAN, the SteelHead 6090, which offers up to 20 Gbps of data movement over optimized WAN for mid-scale data centers, and the SteelHead 4090 and 2090 for mid-sized data center and edge use cases, with 500 Mbps and 200 Mbps of accelerated traffic, as well as up to 10 Gbps of total traffic processing for QoS and application classification use cases, the company said.

Riverbed is also introducing SteelHead Virtual, a software-only version designed for private cloud deployments and is compatible with VMWare ESXI, KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V. The new

SteelHead RS, is a software option that projects business-critical data to the edge while providing near real-time data synchronization between the edge and the data center for faster AI processing at the edge. Lastly, the SteelHead Cloud offering will provide acceleration benefits across a broad range of cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud Platform. The SteelHead Cloud offering is available in each cloud providers’ marketplaces, Riverbed said.

Chalan Aras, senior vice president and general manager of Riverbed’s Acceleration business, said that the new hardware and software options are effectively doubling and tripling SteelHead’s previous performance, while also improving the financial value for that performance.

“This space has been quiet for a while, but with the new networking needs emerging, we’re coming back with a lot more value and a lot more new product capabilities,” Aras said.

Each of the new offerings are powered by RiOS 10, what the company is calling a “significant” update to Riverbed’s acceleration software that has powered more than 100,000 operating locations globally.

Through Riverbed’s new Flex subscription option, licenses can be easily transferred from hardware to virtual to cloud devices at no cost, the company said. Customers can scale capacity up or down based on business needs, and upgrade hardware more cheaply, Riverbed said.