Riverbed Launches Ten New SteelHead Solutions And Flex Subscription Offer

Channel Post MEA

15-05-2025

Riverbed hasintroduced new and enhanced acceleration solutions, vastly improving enterprise network performance, security and IT agility, advancing customers' ability to thrive in the era of AI and massive data growth. This ground-breaking launch, Riverbed's most comprehensive acceleration announcement in seven years, includes ten new Riverbed SteelHead solutions powered by RiOS 10, the company's next-generation acceleration software.
Riverbed's industry-leading solutions enable customers to speed the movement of enterprise data across connected clouds, data centers, and the edge with enhanced security and operational agility. Additionally, customers now have the option to consume these new solutions via the new Riverbed Flex subscription offering, delivering greater architectural freedom, license portability, value-retention, and improved total-cost-of-ownership.
Networks are now constrained, with data volumes surging 35% annually, outpacing network capacity. According to recent ESG analyst research, 91% of IT leaders agree that AI is making networking, and thus network acceleration, critical again, with 85% seeing AI influencing network planning, engineering, and operations. With a large portion of enterprise data being both created and used by AI applications, the performance of everything running over the network is impacted, including critical on-prem and cloud applications and computing at the edge.
'Riverbed was founded 23 years ago this month with a focus on accelerating applications and the movement of data over networks. AI and data-hungry applications have introduced new and more demanding network requirements,' said Dave Donatelli, CEO of Riverbed. 'I'm proud that Riverbed continues to solve our customers' most critical challenges, as demonstrated today by our largest Acceleration launch in seven years. In the first quarter of this year, we saw strong demand in our Acceleration business, achieving 59% year-over-year bookings growth. These new solutions build on our momentum and deliver a proven return on investment by helping customers move data faster, optimize application performance, and strengthen business resilience.'
Next-Generation SteelHead Acceleration Appliances Powered by RiOS 10
RiOS 10, a significant update to Riverbed's acceleration software that has powered more than 100,000 operating locations globally, will deliver new levels of performance for cloud, data centers and the edge, helping customers secure data delivery through advances such as post-quantum cryptography, platform security, and confidential computing. For customers demanding the utmost performance, the new Riverbed SteelHead 90 series will offer new levels of resilient networking performance and value. The four appliances range from the Data Center-ready CXA-8090 to the CXA-2090 optimized for Edge deployments. SteelHead 8090 , delivers up to 60 Gbps of data movement over optimized WAN. It supports multiple 100 Gigabyte network interfaces to pull massive amounts of data from the LAN.
, delivers up to 60 Gbps of data movement over optimized WAN. It supports multiple 100 Gigabyte network interfaces to pull massive amounts of data from the LAN. SteelHead 6090 , delivers up to 20 Gbps of data movement over optimized WAN, targeted for mid-scale data centers.
, delivers up to 20 Gbps of data movement over optimized WAN, targeted for mid-scale data centers. SteelHead 4090 and 2090, support mid-sized data center and edge use cases, with 500 Mbps and 200 Mbps of accelerated traffic, as well as up to 10 Gbps of total traffic processing for QoS and application classification use cases.
'Network congestion is no longer just a nuisance—it's a choke point that can cripple a business. Without fast and efficient data movement over networks, enterprises will quickly find themselves falling behind, missing out on the promise of AI,' said Chalan Aras, SVP and GM of Acceleration at Riverbed. 'Riverbed's new resilient networking solutions help organizations stay ahead of the curve by securely managing growing data volumes and application performance demands, while also improving IT agility to support the dynamic demands of cloud, data center and edge computing.'
For virtualized environments, Riverbed SteelHead Virtual, powered by RiOS 10, is a software only version designed for private cloud deployments delivering similar appliance performance levels and is compatible with VMWare ESXI, KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V.
To further help customers overcome the unique challenges of edge computing, Riverbed is also introducing SteelHead RS, a new software solution that projects business-critical data to the edge while providing near real-time data synchronization between the edge and the data center, enabling fast local application and AI processing at the edge, while maintaining data consistency across the edge and core.
Riverbed SteelHead Cloud, powered by RiOS 10, will deliver breakthrough acceleration benefits across the broadest range of cloud providers – including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and new today – Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud Platform2. The new SteelHead Cloud offering, available in each cloud providers' marketplace, enables enterprises to move data and applications at speeds up to 20 Gbps, ensuring optimal application performance, faster delivery, and significant cost savings compared to traditional methods.
'AI initiatives are increasing the criticality of network performance, requiring reduced latency, increased bandwidth, and richer network observability. While performance can be improved by upgrading network gear and external services, organizations should also prioritize continuous optimization of network connections. These are all requirements that Riverbed's resilient networking solutions address for successfully supporting growing AI workloads,' said Jim Frey, Principal Analyst, Networks, Enterprise Strategy Group.
New Flex Subscription Offering for Acceleration Solutions
Riverbed's new Flex subscription offering gives customers architectural freedom and strong investment protection. Licenses can be easily transferred from hardware to virtual to cloud devices at no cost. Customers can dynamically reassign license capacity across devices, scale capacity up or down based on business needs, and upgrade hardware more cost-effectively as Riverbed introduces new technologies.
'Riverbed Flex allows us to continue to manage our network performance in a smarter, more agile way – exactly what we need in the fast-moving world of offshore operations,' says Dr. Alexei Vederko, Senior Director of Engineering from Viasat Energy Services. 'With rigs constantly relocating, IT must scale, move, and optimize network acceleration on demand. The Flex model allows us to replace and upgrade hardware: minimizing risk when equipment is lost or outdated. As a long-time SteelHead customer, our work with Riverbed allows us to effectively deliver critical data to our oil platforms and ensure operational resiliency. Riverbed Flex is a further step forward in future proofing our network with greater flexibility and control.' 0 0