Riverbed Technology has extended its Steelhead wide area network (WAN) optimization product family with the addition of a new hardware appliance and upgrades to its Steelhead software.

Steelhead WAN optimization solutions can now accelerate a broader range of enterprise infrastructures while expanding IT control and ease of management, including smaller branch offices, cloud infrastructures, SAAS applications, and locations served by hybrid networks.

These enhancements make the Steelhead WAN optimization product family an even more critical part of delivering application performance across the entire business and extends the commitment from Riverbed to deliver acceleration everywhere.

The enhancements include version 8.5 of the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), the software that powers market-leading Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimization solutions, and the new hardware appliance, the Steelhead CX 255 series appliance.

Path selection, a new feature in RiOS 8.5, simplifies the management of hybrid MPLS and Internet networks while delivering maximum performance.

With the introduction of path selection in RiOS 8.5, IT organizations can cost effectively deploy and manage complex hybrid networks to deliver greater application reliability and performance to users anywhere.

Path selection combined with application identification via deep packet inspection (DPI) enables IT and business units to understand usage and performance down to the specific application type and to dynamically reroute application flows in case of performance degradation.

Path selection ensures the right path and service level for each application with no impact to end user experience. With integrated quality of service (QoS) and now path selection, Riverbed WAN optimization solutions provides IT organizations with the ability to control network consumption, prioritizing mission-critical and latency-sensitive applications, while minimizing utilization by recreational traffic.

With this release of RiOS 8.5, Riverbed further strengthens the strategic technology partnerships with Microsoft and NetApp for the benefit of mutual customers.

In RiOS 8.5, Riverbed is introducing new optimizations for business-critical Microsoft applications and environments including SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013, Office365 and file sharing applications that utilize the server message block 3 (SMB3) protocol in Windows 8 and Server 2012 environments. As a result, mutual customers of Microsoft and Riverbed can increase productivity and efficiency, while enhancing business resilience.

With storage intelligent optimization for NetApp SnapMirror, IT organizations can now efficiently prioritize and deliver data replication to ensure business continuity and rapid disaster recovery of critical data. Customers can obtain detailed insights into each storage volume and prioritize replication for the most important data sets while avoiding taxing resources on processing data that will see little benefit. Combined with previous optimizations for replication, data protection goals can be more easily met across the enterprise.

The integration of Cascade Profiler 10.0.7 with RiOS 8.5 extends application-aware network performance management capabilities by integrating DPI capabilities within CascadeFlow data from Steelhead WAN optimization solution deployments.

With detailed application level profiles, decision makers get accurate and deep application and network visibility to identify and characterize traffic flows across the network and among branch offices. This capability enables organizations to quickly identify, prioritize, fine tune QoS parameters and route business-critical applications and non-essential web traffic.

The tightly integrated solution combines WAN optimization with QoS, path selection and application-aware network performance management capabilities, resulting in unprecedented control.

With the introduction of Steelhead CX 255 series appliance, the infrastructure IT team can bring performance and enterprise-class WAN optimization cost-effectively to every branch office, including small branch offices, while delivering the best experience.

With up to six megabits per second bandwidth capacity, the Steelhead CX 255 series appliance has tripled the through-put capacity over the previous Steelhead CX 150 and CX 250 appliance series and provides organizations with a small branch office solution that offers the same benefits found in larger Steelhead WAN optimization solutions, including decreasing bandwidth utilization by up to 98 percent and improving application acceleration up to 100 times faster.

RiOS 8.5, Cascade Profiler 10.0.7 and the Steelhead CX series 255 appliances are expected to be generally available in Q3 2013.