The Minneapolis Riverbed Users Group held its Q3 meeting over lunch on September 29th at the Microsoft Technology Center in Edina MN.
The meeting was well attended by Riverbed staff and local customers. Alex Grossman debut Riverbed’s new video blogging tool which was very cool. If you haven’t seen it yet I’d recommend checking it out here. If you have a web cam and a Riverbed success story your video could earn you a premium Riverbed backpack.
The meeting was scheduled over lunch from 11:30-2pm. I kicked off the meeting and introduced myself as President and welcomed all our guests. We moved into general introductions of the attending members.
Our first speaker was Alex Grossman, Director of Brand Marketing. Alex talked about Riverbed’s new video blogging site where customers can use a web cam to record and submit their IT success stories. They had a few laptops setup and challenged us to submit our triumphs in IT. A few us took his challenge and tested the site. I have to say it’s very simple and makes you feel like a celebrity.
The next speaker was Nik Rouda, Director of Solutions and Vertical Marketing. Nik had an excellent product roadmap presentation and discussed the recent acquisition of: CACE, Aptimize, and Zeus technologies. Nik was able to discuss many new features that will be announced in RiOS 7 as we all signed non-disclosure forms. This is one of the great advantages of the User Group meetings.
Chris Naccarato, Systems Engineer for the newly acquired Zeus product line gave us demonstration on how the Zeus products fit into the Riverbed picture. His demonstration illustrated how the Zeus software can improve application delivery in the scenario where there may not be a Steelhead on both the client and server end of the network traffic you would like to accelerate. Added benefits included offering load balancing, deep packet inspection and http caching.
Nik also mentioned the beta access RAAP (Riverbed Advance Access Program) for more information on this visit http://www.riverbed.com/RAAP
After our speakers finished their presentations we opened the meeting up to the User Group and had a round table discussion on any topics the group would like to discuss.
A few topics that were brought up by the group were:
-Mobile Steelhead and iPhone and Apple support
-VMware PCoIP optimization
-WAN printing
-RiOS upgrade cautions when running RSP
We're planning to have another meeting early next year. Please feel free to contact me if you have any sugguest for topics you would like covered at our next meeting.
