Riverbed Technology Inc. today released two new models of its WAN optimization engine, the Steelhead appliance, which can now achieve network throughput speeds of up to 1Gbit/sec. over Ethernet or OC-12 connections.

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.
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“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.

Read more details analysis of the new products on NetworkWorld.com…