Riverbed 2.0

At their analyst meeting in SF last week, Riverbed gave the first public glimpse into their next big thing, which in fact is a pretty interesting and possibly quite big thing -- Atlas. Atlas is a new family of appliances that can be used in conjunction with the existing Riverbed appliances to create a "de-duplication" file system. Riverbed's SDR "compression" technology is used to find redundancy in stored files and "compress" that redundancy out. The product is just entering early customer trials now and isn't expected to be made generally available until 2009 but this obviously represents a quite bold step into some very new markets and given that one interesting application would be to build a distributed file system it isn't unrelated to the current business. The interesting Mr. McCanne strikes again!