Riverbed and Resolve ICT have teamed up in Nigeria to introduce the Steelhead family of appliances used in TCP/Internet Protocol traffic optimization.
These make it easier for organizations to accelerate the most important applications for users across the globe.
According to Nelio DeFreitas, technical director for Riverbed Africa, the Riverbed Wide-Area Data Service solution (WDS) improves application performance, reduces bandwidth utilization, accelerates the consolidation of IT infrastructure, as well as enables faster network-based backup.
"The Riverbed Steelhead appliances increase user productivity by speeding the performance of applications between distributed sites and between remote offices and enterprise datacenters, allowing faster access to centrally located applications and facilitating collaboration within a distributed workforce."
He said Riverbed focuses on four major areas in developing its solutions and these include: Streamlining of data by removing redundant data and prioritizing traffic through advanced quality of service mechanisms; transport streamlining by improving the behaviour of TCP/IP, application streamlining by reducing protocol inefficiencies and management streamlining through simplified appliance deployment, maintenance and operational management.
DeFreitas speaking on the strategic business impacts of the product said, "The use of Riverbed WDS enables customers to avoid the cost of upgrading to higher bandwidth and more costly telecommunications services."
Jumping from one bandwidth to another can be quite expensive, he observed. However, Riverbed has dealt with that situation.
Other business impacts according to him include, geographic expansion, working within bandwidth limitations, IT operational efficiency, restructuring the business to be closer to the customer and data protection and regulatory requirements.
Also speaking at the event was Chris Mulhall, account manager for Africa, Netscout Systems, who lauded the Netscout nGenius solution as a unified performance management system that assures efficient delivery of applications across the distributed network.
"It also troubleshoots network problems in real-time and provides unique visibility to control the cost of network operations," he said.
Mulhall listed the benefits of the nGenius solution to include application visibility, proactive control, mean time to resolution (MTTR) reduction, ICT productivity and collaboration enhancement, total cost of ownership reduction and large network environment support.