WAN optimization vendor Riverbed Technology attacks caching, compression and application acceleration with its Steelhead network appliances and says it can put the functionality of four or five products in one box.

The San Francisco start-up, founded in 2002, launched its first product in April and has since signed more than 50 customers - and it is currently testing its product in 80 more IT shops.

According to a report from JMP Securities, Riverbed competes with companies such as Expand Networks, Orbital Data, Packeteer and Peribit in the WAN optimization market. JMP analyst Sam Wilson estimates in the August report that the market for such optimization technologies will grow from $200 million in 2004 to between $2 billion and $4 billion by 2007.

"Riverbed has support for ultra compression, TCP optimization and file server application protocol acceleration," Wilson states in the report. JMP Securities goes on to say that through partnerships, such as Riverbed’s deal with storage giant EMC, and further product developments, Riverbed will expand its capabilities beyond its current offering as a consolidated data center optimization box.

"Our appliances not only address bandwidth constraints over the WAN, but [also] TCP chattiness as well as application chattiness. We do address multiple WAN acceleration capabilities with one product without requiring customers to install multiple boxes in their data center," says Eric Wolford, vice president of business development and marketing at Riverbed.

Riverbed packages its technology on Linux-based off-the-shelf PC servers, which must be installed on either side of a WAN connection. Riverbed engineers tackled WAN optimization from three angles:

* Scalable Data Referencing (SDR), which the company says solves customer bandwidth problems. This technology allows Steelhead appliances to decompose the structure of data, find similarities among the bytes, and instead of sending the content over the WAN in its byte form, it sends a data reference. The data reference eliminates the need to send the same data over the WAN and reduces the amount of bytes being sent; only the data that is different is sent. "About 70% to 90% of WAN traffic is repetitive and can be redundant," Wolford says. "This feature removes bytes from the WAN."

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.