Riverbed announced two new press releases[1] – [2] the enhancement of its flagship Steelhead product to include optimization of Citrix XenDesktop virtual desktop solution and for ESX powered clouds.
Steelhead is a WAN acceleration product meant to improve speed and user experience over slow or high-latency links. It promises up to 60% performance gain over the standard ICA protocol used by Citrix, and even 30x performance gain and 98% traffic reduction for the Steelhead Cloud solution. The latter will provide acceleration on the link between Riverbed and cloud providers running VMware such as Terremark and ZettaServe.
Steelhead Cloud already supported Amazon EC2, and is now completing its offering by optimizing some of the most relevant players left in the market.