Riverbed announced earlier today the release of version 6.1 of the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS), which powers Riverbed’s wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions. This release will accelerate Riverbeds organizations’ pathway to the cloud by providing enhanced acceleration for cloud services and enterprise applications. This will provide organizations with more flexibility when determining the best approach for consolidating IT resources to public, private and hybrid cloud environments and ensure that organizations obtain maximum performance regardless of their network architecture.

“With this release, Riverbed is providing its customers with the necessary tools to support critical IT initiatives such as private and public cloud computing, IT centralization and disaster recovery. As CIOs turn to centralized IT models to reduce costs, WAN optimization is an increasingly critical tool required to maintain performance and ensure that distant employees remain productive,” said Cindy Borovick, vice president at IDC.

“The Riverbed Steelhead appliances have allowed International Justice Mission (IJM) to accelerate application performance — especially email and our centralized Intranet and training running on SharePoint. These are critical applications for training our employees working in the field and communicating about rescue missions,” said John Lax, Vice President of Information Systems at IJM. “We are very interested in Riverbed’s plans to accelerate Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010 in the newest version of RiOS. As we look into upgrading our IT infrastructure to the new Microsoft portfolio, having fast access to these new applications is critical to our mission.”

“As organizations continue to consolidate IT environments and explore cloud computing, they face performance challenges in connecting users over the WAN to business-critical applications and data. Riverbed’s advanced application- and network-level fluency provides our customers with substantially improved performance over other acceleration products, regardless of which network architecture they use, which applications they run, or where their data resides,” said Apurva Dave, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed.