McAfee's Firewall Enterprise software will run as a virtual instance in the WAN optimization appliance, which the two companies say will help enterprise customers with multiple locations to optimize distributed network computing in a secure fashion. Server centralization, data center consolidation and a highly mobile workforce are three business trends that Riverbed addresses with its products.
The McAfee software runs on a virtualized layer called the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), which is a virtual software layer integrated with the Steelhead appliance hardware. It lets a variety of services run as a virtual instances within the hardware, eliminating the need to deploy separate physical servers for each function. The reduced physical footprint, capital investment in hardware, and power footprint helps to reduce operational overhead, according to Riverbed.
Riverbed's Steelhead WAN optimization appliance targets organizations of all sizes, the company says, and helps to solve IT problems including private cloud infrastructure bottlenecks such as poor application performance, slow database replication, and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. "By speeding the performance of applications between data centers, remote offices and mobile workers, in some cases by up to 100 times, the award-winning Riverbed Steelhead products enable companies to consolidate IT while improving staff productivity and collaboration", Riverbed said.
Running as a virtualized instance on the appliance, the McAfee Firewall Enterprise software will provide a virtual private network function for secure inter-site connectivity, spam protection, and URL/Web content filtering. It will enable administrators to inspect encrypted traffic, and configure protection rules at the application layer. Centralized firewall management is a key feature of the device, McAfee said.
“Riverbed’s customers are consolidating their IT infrastructure and moving data farther from users, which has negatively impacted the response times of business-critical applications. Our WAN optimization solutions help enterprises overcome these issues and deliver LAN-like application performance to distributed employees,” said Venugopal Pai, vice president of alliances at Riverbed. “In addition to accelerating performance over the WAN, it is a logical extension to partner with companies like McAfee whose best-of-breed network security solutions are essential for a reliable distributed IT infrastructure.”
The solution ships this month.