Riverbed Unleashes A Hungry “Project Tiger”
“The future of the WAN is NOT . . . a router.”
These bold words were spoken by Riverbed’s Josh Dobies in a presentation to the delegates at Networking Field Day 10 this August, as a lead in to the first public announcement of “Project Tiger.”
Anatomy of a Tiger
Riverbed explained that the SteelHead appliances perform WAN optimization in sites with highly contended bandwidth. The SteelFusion appliances offer both “hyperconverged infrastructure” and WAN optimization. For sites that have plenty of bandwidth, however, there’s no Riverbed product you can put there and that–for Riverbed at least–is a problem. Riverbed’s proposed solution? Ironically, it’s an appliance that can act as a WAN router, but with some rather unusual features.
Key Technical Takeaways
The headline features of Project Tiger as I see it, are:
- New SteelOS™ modular operating system (replacing RiOS)
- Containerization technology, used for the SteelOS modules
- Service-Chaining capability
- Riverbed SD-WAN features
- Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP), with policy and configuration managed centrally in SteelCentral™
- BGP and OSPF to exchange routes with adjacent MPLS CE routers, for example.
Surprisingly absent from that list, however, is WAN Optimization. Despite being Riverbed’s core competency, this is not a feature of the Project Tiger appliance. Because Continue reading