Wilson also noted improvements in file-transfer performance. He cites an impromptu test involving a 5GB file he refers to as "my bellwether": With the previous version of the software, transferring the file to the company's U.K. office could take more than an hour. With the new version, he says, it takes a minute and a half to two minutes. The difference allowed him to decommission an in-house disk mirroring system he no longer needs, he said.

Riverbed, which filed IPO documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission in April, also announced two higher-end Steelhead devices this week, as well as the Interceptor 9200, which is essentially a Steelhead router, Wolford said. The Steelhead 5520 supports up to 15,000 simultaneous TCP connections, has a disk capacity of 1.5TB and can provide optimized bandwidth of up to 155Mbit/sec. with disk de-duplication enabled and 800Mbit/sec. with disk de-duplication disabled. The Steelhead 6020 supports up to 40,000 simultaneous TCP connections, has a disk capacity of 3.2TB and can provide optimized bandwidth of up to 310Mbit/sec. with disk de-duplication enabled and 800Mbit/sec. with disk de-duplication disabled. The Interceptor 9200 supports up to a million simultaneous TCP connections and up to 4Gbit/sec. of optimized WAN throughput.

All the announced products are available this week. The Steelhead 5520 costs US$69,996. The Steelhead 6020 costs $119,995. Central Management Console software starts at $5,000. The Interceptor 9200 costs $49,995.

Brian Garrett, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. in Milford, Mass., praised the product lines' scalability. With the new release, Riverbed now has hardware platforms that can serve companies requiring minimal WAN capacity of 1Mbit/sec. and 25 TCP connections, ranging up to systems serving enterprises requiring an impressive 4Gbit/sec. and 1,000,000 optimized TCP connections, he said.