WAN optimization

Riverbed gets Mazu Networks for a bargain

WAN optimization heavyweight Riverbed Technology gobbled up Mazu Networks this week for just $25 million in cash. Mazu is a privately held company that sells network behavior analysis (NBA) tools that analyze the interaction between users, applications and systems. Mazu Profiler, the company’s flagship product, is used for security monitoring, but like many NBA vendors, customers have been increasingly using it for monitoring and analyzing the performance of rich critical applications like voice and video.

Riverbed apparently is acquiring Mazu so that it can better evaluate the state of application performance over a customer’s wide area network. The comapny’s press release explains that Mazu’s ability to give “a holistic, real-time view of application usage and performance” is critical to understanding the “application environment and taking the right steps to validate and ensure delivery of business-critical applications across the wide area network.”

Riverbed’s cash payment of $25 million for Mazu is definitely a bargain. According to GigaOm, venture capitalists have invested $40 million into the company. The blog peHub puts the VC figure at $47 million. The VC firms might get their money back if Mazu performs for Riverbed. The terms of the sale include an additional payment of up to $22 million based on the sales performance of Mazu in the 12 months following the closing of the deal.

Riverbed spills into storage market

Riverbed, a well-known vendor in the WAN optimization space, is now expanding their product line to include a new storage optimization appliance called Atlas — which will place them as a strong contender in the storage market space. Although the product is not set to launch until the beginning of next year, it is said to revolutionize data storage by applying some of its WAN optimization tricks to the server.

How will Atlas put them on the map? The concept of the technology is as VP of Product Marketing Alan Saldich says: “It’s almost like virtualizing data.”

For those unfamiliar with their typical WAN optimization deployment, steelhead appliances are applied to either side of a WAN link to conduct deduplication in storage file servers. But Riverbed’s Atlas steelhead appliances will break files down into bits, and send only information to the server that hasn’t been seen before.

“The Atlas appliance is very much like [an] indexer. It doesn’t hold the information; it holds pointers to where that information is stored,” says Saldich.

Since so much of back-up data is duplicated, Riverbed finds their method would potentially save as much as 80% of storage space in file servers.

What does this mean for their WAN optimization products? Although some may see this product announcement as a way for Riverbed to drift away from their original market, they are merely diversifying their portfolio. PR rep Nicole Schlossberg says “Riverbed is not leaving the WAN optimization space. Atlas is an addition to the product line.”

The line between network and storage markets is too permeable for a vendor to see them as two separate spaces. It makes sense that a WAN optimization vendor could also optimize your storage. And though the marketplace has dissolved the line between these two siloed groups, the workforce hasn’t moved its IT structure to adapt.

Are the Olympics IT’s worst nightmare?

It sure sounds like it from where I sit sometimes. Shamus has a piece where he reports on how streaming Olympics video will drain corporate bandwidth, and what some IT departments are doing (or not doing) to curb bottlenecks. Talking to Blue Coat and Cisco yesterday, I felt privy to some evil conspiracy: Not only do they sell equipment that helps IT manage massive influxes, but they’re helping create and send through all that pesky HD content. Where’s their compassion for the common man?

As if this was not bad enough already, Tallulah David, who does PR for Merritt Group, pointed me to another scary Olympic angle on SOPHOS labs’ security blog: Ne’er-do-wells tapping into the Olympic excitement to spread exploits through Olympic-themed trojans and even legitimate news agencies like the AFP, with many of their partners falling victim to a SQL injection attack.

Even Beijing National Stadium, the site of the opening ceremonies and one of the most advanced venues I’ve ever seen, suffered a Blue Screen of Death during its critical moment in the spotlight.

And this doesn’t even touch all the non-technical scrutiny the networking profession has received based on China’s massive Internet filtering and firewalling project. Why can’t IT just cheer for Team USA, or Team China or India or Britain, in relative peace for once? Is that too much to ask?

Cisco WAAS 4.1 video demo

In this video, Feng Meng, solutions manager from Cisco data center, gives a quick tour of WAAS 4.1, which incorporates ease of deployment, application-specific acceleration, branch-ready video delivery capabilities, and flexible branch services delivery through virtualization capabilities.