Analysis

posted on 07 May 2008 13:09

A coming storage product was mentioned in the latest earnings call by Riverbed CEO Jerry Kennelly. What is it likely to be?

Riverbed is quite tight-lipped about it but a source famiiar with the situation has said that it is not storage software running on the Steelhead appliance and using Riverbed's platform services.

Steelhead is a wide-area network data services (WADS) product that accelerates data transmission across a WAN by reducing the chattiness of TCP/IP, de-duping the files to be transmitted, at the sub-file level, and other tecniques.

We know from Kennelly's comments that the coming product will be available and earning revenue in 2009 and that it relates to data centre consolidation.

It appears that the product contains software, currently being completed by Riverbed, indicating that it is not bought-in technology but an organic, native to Riverbed development. Our information is that it is a storage virtualisation product.

This gives us two main possibilities: it virtualises files or it virtualises blocks. Riverbed is not a storage vendor; its skills lying in taking storage content and squirting it out at high speed across a WAN link. In other words it makes a box that sits between storage resources and the network and which caches storage content.

We might envisage a box that either virtualises file storage like an F5/Acopia ARX product, or which virtualises blocks like an IBM SAN Volume Controller.

Given Riverbed's history in the WADS area then either possibility looks credible.

^{[Chris Mellor, editor.]}