Riverbed Products

By: Andrew Keen Click author's name for more of his/her articles

Whether it be a small sales office with just a few workers, or major design centres and corporate facilities with thousands of employees. Riverbed's Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile software can provide wide-area data services (WDS) that will benefit your organisation. These devices offer a simple resolution for businesses that need to accelerate applications that are most vital to their user, anywhere in the world. Steelhead appliances come in a wide range of sizes to satisfy the requirements of any remote office. In addition Steelhead Mobile software allows workers at any location to receive LAN-like access to files and applications whether the worker is working from home, on the road, or even at customer sites.

The family of Steelhead products maximises traffic in both directions, and is transparent to your applications. In addition to this there is no need for reconfiguration to client and server software. All Steelhead products are architectured for simple implementation into your existing network, with no adaptations to routers or servers necessary, and ultimate compatibility with existing QoS and VoIP implementations.

At the same time as reducing bandwidth, Steelhead appliances and software can accelerate application performance from 5 up to 50 times, and in some cases even up to 100 times. Implementing Steelhead appliances and software can provide more responsive applications, successful consolidation of distributed IT infrastructure, and allow for expedited network-based backup and replication.

Every Steelhead product is equipped with the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS):

Data Streamlining optimizes all WAN traffic by removing all redundant data and prioritizing traffic through advanced QoS mechanisms
Transport Streamlining improves the behaviour of TCP
Application Streamlining reduces application protocol inefficiencies and enables disconnected operations
Management Streamlining simplifies the deployment, maintenance, and management of the appliances.

The Forrester WAVE report recently declared that Riverbed "is the clear leader" in this market. As well as that Gartner's most recent Magic Quadrant on this space also placed Riverbed in the leader's quadrant, with the most complete vision and the highest ability to execute. In fact, most analysts remark that Riverbed has the most ultimate strategy for wide-area data services and application acceleration.

With Riverbed, you can be assured that your organization has the most capable, widely used, and most technically progressive solution for accelerating applications over the WAN.

Purposely built products that provide the most feasible acceleration for the broadest range of enterprise applications. This means that users throughout your company can see impressive and immediate advantages from the Steelhead product family. The Steelhead family is built on an application-independent architecture that optimizes all TCP traffic for bandwidth utilization and TCP behaviour. In addition to this, Riverbed has built a series of Application Streamlining modules that further optimize applications like Windows, Exchange, HTTP, HTTPS, NFS, and MS SQL.

Riverbed products can be installed within 10 to 15 minutes normally. The appliances can be pre-configured at the factory to your special desires. Then when your appliance arrives you simply plug your new Steelhead appliance into the network. Once deployed, Steelhead appliances can use auto-discovery to automatically find all the other Steelhead appliances on the network. This means no tedious tunnel configurations often required by other products.

Configuration of Steelhead Mobile software is simple and only needs a small software package to be installed on end users' laptops or desktops, and that's it. Their applications will carry on working as normal (before the Steelhead appliances were installed), only faster. No proxy configuration is needed, neither do any routing tables need to be adjusted.

Although the default state for Steelhead appliances is to stop and optimize all WAN traffic, administrators can choose to restrict or specify optimization by protocol, port, or IP address range. Steelhead appliances can be deployed in virtually all network topologies. They can be deployed in-path, out-of-path, in various high-availability configurations, near specific servers, or virtually anywhere depending on your specific requirements. Steelhead Mobile software scales to all of your mobile workers simply, and also provides easy and flexible configuration policies to help manage performance, including optimization policies and data store size.

Each Steelhead appliance and Steelhead Mobile client are controlled through a rich GUI or command-line interface. This enables remote configuration and management across the organization. All Steelhead appliances can report traffic and network optimization, and segment reports by port, protocol, or IP address range. Steelhead Mobile reporting provides statistics down to an individual user in terms of performance, health and issues.

Enterprises can also utilize the optional Central Management Console (CMC), which allows the administrator to set up and manage multiple Steelhead appliances simultaneously. The CMC offers device grouping features, dynamic reporting, scheduled operations, over-the-wire software upgrades, and automatic seamless setup of new Steelhead appliances in your network.

Riverbed Steelhead appliances can be used in a wide range of high-availability configurations to deliver continued optimized performance in the event of an appliance failure. These configurations are good for both in-path and out-of-path deployments. Steelhead appliances also allow automated datastore copying, making sure that failover devices have the most up-to-date user data available. In addition Steelhead appliance models 3020 and up also feature RAID and triple power supplies to enhance reliability.