Riverbed
More info
- Creator
- Jerry Kennelly, Steve McCanne
- Released
- 2002
- Type
- Networking company
The appliances that made the head-office file server feel local to the branch three time zones away.
Founded in 2002 in San Francisco by Jerry Kennelly and Steve McCanne, the latter known from the tcpdump days at Berkeley Lab. Its SteelHead boxes were deployed in pairs at either end of a WAN link, deduplicating traffic, caching data and rewriting chatty protocols like SMB to cut round trips. Over a sluggish line, a file copy could run dozens of times faster.
The business assumed offices pulled data from their own data centres. Once everything moved to SaaS and the cloud, and SD-WAN solved part of the problem more cheaply, the market shrank. Thoma Bravo bought Riverbed in 2015, and it went through a restructuring in 2021.