Riverbed User Groups

[tprokop]

RECAP - March 6, 2012 Meeting

The North Central Riverbed Users Group (Cleveland / Pittsburgh) held their second meeting on Tuesday, March 6th in the Cleveland area.  Approximately 15 community users were present along with a number of Riverbed employees.

Bob Gilbert, from Riverbed, was the featured speaker and presented an updated Riverbed Roadmap. Bob covered RiOS 7.0 which is Riverbed's most aggressive release with new features. He talked about UDP optimization, Video optimization, VDI optimization (Citrix ICA and plans for VMware View PCoIP) and the challenges of accelerating PCoIP traffic for VMWare View.

He covered the new features of Cascade, Pilot and Shark products. Including that the 9.5 release will have some VOIP monitoring and load balancer features. The Stingray and Granite product lines were also covered.

Steve Barstow was welcomed as the Vice President of the User's Group and a round table discussion was held covering a number of different topics.

As usual Riverbed made sure we were all fed well.

Tom and Steve look forward to hearing from all about "deep-dive" or focused topics you would like to see presented and covered in future meetings. For example, maybe a real-life demo of Cascade or Steelheads in someone's environment.

Keep your eye on these posts for more information.

Tom

[tprokop]

This is a shout out to anyone interested in participating in the next User's Group meeting. I am starting to get ready to hold the next user's group meeting. I am interested in seeing topics and potential locations in the Pittsburgh, PA or Cleveland, OH area (or anywhere around there).

[emarcus]

It was my pleasure, Tom.  Thank you for running the meeting, and the kind words.  I look forward to doing many more of these with you and the Group in the future.

[tprokop]

I’m excited to announce that the North Central Riverbed Users Group held its first meeting on Wednesday, September 15th. This first meeting was held at the corporate headquarters of CONSOL Energy located in the Pittsburgh suburb of Canonsburg, PA.

The meeting was scheduled to run from 2:00PM to 4:00PM and pretty much kept to this time table. Although the initial registration was promising we had a sparse crowd. The crowd consisted mainly of Riverbed and CONSOL Energy employees, although one individual braved the drive from Erie, PA to attend.

Tom Prokop, Manager of Infrastructure & Remote Services at CONSOL Energy and President of the North Central Riverbed Users Group, introduced himself and I talked a little bit about the use of Steelheads and Cascade at CONSOL Energy. I then asked the attendees to introduce themselves, and talk a bit about what Riverbed products they use. Riverbed Steelheads and Cascade were the products in use.

Our first speaker was Dave Nahas, Support Engineer, Riverbed Technology. Dave provided an overview of the Zeus product. Zeus is a new acquisition of Riverbed. The Zeus product “delivers high-performance software-based load balancing and traffic management”. Dave was followed by the featured speaker, Evan Marcus, Senior Marketing Evangelist, Riverbed Technology.

Evan presented a Roadmap of the Riverbed products. All present were covered by a “Non-Disclosure Agreement” so Evan was able to cover many new features that are being planned in all product lines. This is one of the big features of the User’s Group format. Attendees get to discuss and talk about what is upcoming, what business needs they have, and how current technology can be used to meet those needs.

After Evan’s excellent presentation, we then discussed how as a user’s group we want to move forward. Topics included meeting logistics, how frequently we should try to get together (quarterly), where meeting should be held, and the type of presentations we would be interested in seeing. As for locations, we will be looking to host the meeting at different locations around the North Central area to increase the participation. Various areas around Pittsburgh, Erie, Cleveland, OH were discussed with the thought that somewhere in the Cranberry area north of Pittsburgh would be ideal for the Erie, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh participants. Please let me know if you have other ideas.

As a parting note to this recap, I’d like to hear from other Riverbed users in the North Central Area. Post your comments to this forum or send them to me at tomprokop@consolenergy.com. I’d like to hear what you want, where meetings should be held so that we can grow the group and make it really meet the needs of our community.

Hope to see you at the next meeting, stay tuned for more details.

Tom