When John Higgs, VP for Asia Pacific of Riverbed Technology, took the stage at this year’s NetEvents APAC Press Summit, Singapore, and asked us to believe the unbelievable, it brought out the skeptical journalist in me. The program announcement of his presentation sounded a bit too much like a product pitch – not what we expect from NetEvents which is very much a forum for debate and visionary ideas. That simply reinforced my resistance. And yet, I have to admit, I was converted. I now believe in unbelievable IT. Here’s why…
THE PROMISE
Firstly, what does John Higgs mean by unbelievable IT? The following diagram from his slide set paints the picture…

Basically, his promise is to optimize the WAN infrastructure and boost application performance across a network by five to 50 times, in some cases up to 100 times, and reduce WAN bandwidth utilization by 65 to 95%. In simpler terms, he claims that your worldwide enterprise WAN could perform like a single-site LAN.
THE PROOF
John Higgs had some real examples to back his claim:
• Alstom, a global nuclear engineering firm, consolidated its servers from scores of offices with no reduction in performance for users – and saw a three month payback.
• CSX, one of the two major US freight railways, tripled the usage of their key distributed application and reduced the time for regional managers to download their daily briefings from 1 hour to just a few minutes.
• Lantmännen, one of the largest food, energy and agricultural groups in the Nordic region, cut $6.5 million in overall IT infrastructure costs in one year, and reckons that over 5 years their savings in servers, energy consumption, telco and headcount will be over $60 million.
• Gensler, the largest architecture firm in the world, improved their AutoCAD file sharing by 70 times, enabling them to completely change the way they work to bring the right expertise to bear on any project with the right people at the right time.
• Dish Network, also known as EchoStar is one of the major satellite TV service providers in the US. They are saving $20 million over three years on reduced call center headcount and telecom expense, resulting in a six month payback on investment.
• Citigroup reduced the time to replicate SnapMirror data from 23 hours to 2.5 hours – a near 90% reduction.
• And Boeing has speeded up collaboration and productivity of thousands of globally distributed mobile engineers and partner suppliers across 70 countries on the development of the company’s new passenger jet, the Dreamliner 787.
THE COMPANY
This looks impressive – so what is Riverbed? If you haven’t heard the name, you soon will, for Riverbed, founded in 2002, is a company that is suddenly breaking news. Jerry Kennelly, Riverbed’s President and CEO, made his name with the highly successful Inktomi, since snapped up by Yahoo. His mission was to solve one of the last great problems in networking – eliminating the adverse effects of distance and latency. Riverbed started shipping its products in early 2005 and since then the market has mushroomed. Riverbed reported an exceptional 40% year on year growth for 2008, while many other IT companies shrank under economic melt-down.
Riverbed has been voted among the ”Best Places to Work” in Silicon Valley, for providing a fertile environment for a dynamic, creative workforce and still expanding while others lay off staff. Jerry Kennelly himself was singled out as ”The Most Admired CEO” by the San Francisco Business Times. I quote: ”Riverbed employees say Kennelly’s style empowers them to move quickly – finding market openings and responding to customer needs – to hold their own against networking giants like San Jose-based Cisco Systems.”
Riverbed’s business benefits look good, the company looks good, the financial results look good and ”better performance at lower cost” is very much the message for our troubled times. So, if it’s possible to get such dramatic improvements in WAN performance, why aren’t others doing it? Where’s the competition?
John Higgs explained that this is their own technology, designed from the ground up: ” We are a one-horse player, it's all we do. We've developed this technology and stuck with this technology, so we have to stay ahead. Talk to the analysts, at this stage we are growing our technology lead and we think we've got a two to three-year lead on any competition. That could change, but with the team we have in place and the spirit of our employees worldwide, it’s unlikely.”
One reason Riverbed took time to be recognised is because their promise to boost performance sounded just too good to be true, they had to get across the credibility gap. Another factor was that their promise to slash bandwidth requirements was not initially welcomed by service providers. John Higgs draws a parallel with another de-stabilising technology breakthrough: ” When VOIP came along the telcos thought ’this is absolutely dreadful for our revenue’. What happened? Not only did the telcos make money on offering VoIP, but they've been able to offer premium services, reduce their costs and make more margin. The same is happening again with WAN optimization. Many of the service providers around the world have adopted and standardized on Riverbed technology and are offering it as a service. We have 10 Service Providers in Asia alone, all providing managed services based on this technology.”
THE SOLUTION
So what is this technology, and how is it delivered to the customer? This is extremely impressive: WAN optimization is delivered in the form of added boxes which are installed transparently. As WANs have expanded and upgraded over the years, you might expect WAN optimization to be a process of redesigning the infrastructure from the ground up and rebuilding to optimal architecture. But no, Riverbed simply asks you to place its Steelhead boxes into the network as shown in the next diagram – the orange boxes labeled WAN optimization Appliance – together with a Central Management Console (for larger networks) at the primary datacentre.

So where do we place these transparent “appliances”? Beginning at the branch office, we see a WAN optimization device on the LAN behind the firewall, and a similar device at the head office primary datacentre. The boxes work together, but many branch offices can connect to a single WAN optimization box in the datacentre. If the network is large, you can opt for a CMC (Central Management Console) to provide real-time visibility and upgrades to the WAN Optimization devices.
Note the mobile worker: instead of a separate box, the equivalent technology is available as PC software installed on the laptop and interfacing directly to the datacentre device. No complicated set up is required as the software and devices are all auto-discovery and require just minutes to configure.
As the title says: “No changes to your network!” It’s fast, simple and a massive saving.
THE TECHNOLOGY
So what is the underlying technology behind this miracle? The answer is not simple, because it involves integrating a number of technologies into a single, plug-in solution. But the essence of it is illustrated here:

The first step is to reduce data flow. Unlike previous attempts at WAN optimization which used caching of “pages”, compression or packet prioritization techniques, the Riverbed technology looks at binary data and its “patterns” rather than caching whole files. When Steelhead detects a pattern seen before, it doesn’t send it, instead it sends a “map” of where that data resides on “the other side”. Since most data is repetitive, this technique typically reduces the amount of data sent by 65 to 98 percent. Already less bandwidth is required, more users and applications can be supported and the response time is improved – and we’ve only just started!
The second trick is to optimize the TCP protocol: Riverbed’s Transport Streamlining uses a set of standards-based techniques to optimize the TCP traffic between Steelhead appliances. These approaches include increased maximum TCP window sizes to minimise the throughput impact of latency. Transport Streamlining also includes High Speed TCP and MX-TCP transport options which can be used to maximize the throughput on WAN links having plenty of bandwidth, but high levels of latency. Specifically, MX-TCP can help maintain data transfer throughput where adverse network conditions – such as abnormally high packet loss – impair the performance and throughput of “normal” TCP connections.
MX-TCP deals effectively with packet loss without the loss of throughput typically experienced with TCP. This makes any latency-prone link work like lightning – the worse the communication links, the better the result, because the worse the latency, the greater the improvement in performance.
Riverbed claim to have deployed this on many satellite links with astonishing results, enabling applications to work where they simply would not work before. As an example, in Indonesia where they have horrible latency problems due to satellite usage, this technology serves oil rigs in extremely remote sites.
The third main step is to eliminate the inefficient behavior of many applications and their associated protocols (the application layer), caused by hundreds of round trips, or other inefficiencies generated by the most fundamental applications such as Windows and UNIX file sharing, Microsoft Exchange, Oracle Forms, Lotus Notes, MS-SQL and others. By constraining their chatty protocols to the LANs, where there is ample bandwidth and very low latency, the number of round trips on your WAN is minimized.
Complementing and rounding out all of this is Cascade, Riverbed’s application visibility and reporting tool. Cascade will tell you where and when WAN optimization is required and also let you know that optimized links remain optimized on an ongoing basis.
THE CUSTOMERS
John Higgs dropped a few names to show just how different market segments can benefit – names as diverse as Coca Cola, Volkswagen, Honeywell, Pfizer, Nike, Disney, HBO Bank, Shell, Barclays, Boeing, Kraft and Best Buy.
Among his case studies was Citigroup. The company wanted to change their data backups from tape to online transfers, eliminating the potential security risk of tapes lost in transit. Previously online backup demanded too much expensive bandwidth and excessive time. Their network people wanted to throw massive bandwidth at the problem, then the applications people said ”no, we can spend a 100th of what you would spend on bandwidth – which won't work anyway – and solve this with application acceleration” i.e. WAN optimization.
Citigroup put it to the test, doing online backup using NETAPPS Snap Mirror application. Without optimization it took 23 hours, with Riverbed optimization the online transfer took only 3.5 hours and, what’s more, they achieved 99% data reduction! As Citigroup themselves put it: “We avoided building a multi-million dollar data center by deploying a $50,000 WDS solution. The ROI was instantaneous.”
A very different example came from Singapore. Singtel were running a variety of managed services called TOPS, but TOPS was competing with so many other managed services that, like bandwidth, they needed a differentiator. So Singtel rolled out an optimized service using Riverbed Steelheads, and called it TOPS AA (TOPS Application Accelerated). You can have the base service or you can pay a premium and have the turbo-charged service – it's given them significant market differentiation.
THE CONCLUSION
In troubled times it’s tempting to grasp for miracles, and John Higgs came on like a snake-oil salesman promising benefits just too good to be true. Then, like any good snake-oil salesman, he backed his claims with amazing customer testimonials – and these were big name customers. Next he outlined his credentials and the story behind the amazing success of Riverbed – and only the very best snake oil salesman can go that far!
But when he explained the principles behind the technology, it really began to make sense – unlike the snake-oil salesman’s pitch. He was also modest enough to relate his company’s success to being in the right place at the right time – “most IT giants grew by selling capacity. In times like these there’s less demand for capacity, people want efficiency, return on investment, and that’s what Riverbed delivers.”
We were no longer listening to a snake-oil salesman. This was a man with an amazing technology perfectly matched to the most pressing needs of today – better communications, better business systems, at less cost and minimal effort.
I now believe in unbelievable IT.