Riverbed Technology is jumping further upstream in the virtualization space with its Steelhead appliances, announcing optimization of vSphere replication traffic effective immediately. The announcement was made at VMworld 2011.

The new support means faster backup and replication no matter the type and brand of storage, said Miles Kelly, senior director of product marketing at Riverbed.

“Today, the options for backup and replication tools often are tied to the storage environment and brand of storage, which is okay when you’re a large organization with a lot of storage. But for the midsize companies where the vSphere replication toolset targeted, a lot of times they don’t want to be forced into selecting the replication tool that comes with the storage environment. vSphere replication site recover manager allows user to use any backup and replication tool of their choice.”

Joe Ghoury, senior product marketing manager at Riverbed, added the ability for Steelhead to optimize the vSphere traffic is good for partners and their customers on two levels: “By making it possible to use lower-cost non-storage-specific tools on the back end users can have greater protection because it makes it lower cost to do so. And because there is a lower cost overall, it does extend the idea of backup and replication to a wider audience – the natural flow is people centralize and want to do disaster recovery but many things have made it a secondary project. Now everyone can achieve a robust backup and replication strategy,” he said.

“We looked at the world through our partners’ eyes and did an extensive look at how they go to market,” Kelly noted. “More and more partners are presenting solutions to their customers that span multiple products, and we found two of the popular solutions areas were around virtual desktop and backup and recovery, so the vSphere replication fits nicely into that practice.”