riverbed steelhead

Mon Apr 25 17:55:15 UTC 2011

I personally would take Riverbed over Cisco for one main reason that I have
discovered when I was researching them (that was good 3-4 years ago and
cisco may have "improved" since).

Cisco "accelerates" based on application. That is to say if it's not a well
known application protocol, they do not do anything with it.
So, they are probably good for HTTP/FTP/Samba etc.

Riverbed does not care for applications (they still support application
based acceleration, but they also support non standard stuff). They take
something along the lines of data hashes and store them (along with data of
course). They just store raw bytes as opposed to a let's say a file. That
played out well when I had to make a decision about which brand to purchase
for the company that had a homegrown application. So in a nutshell, Riverbed
improved performance of that application (as well as all the standard
players like HTTP/FTP etc), while cicso said outright that they won't.

After purchase, we saw a dramatic improvement in "user experience"
(basically the complaints stopped) from our EU site that was accessing
windows (samba) based file servers in USA. Those guys at the time were
connected to the US office over MLPPP (4 T1s). Samba sucked for them along
with everything else.

The only issue I had with Riverbed is their licensing model feels very
backwards. It took me a while to understand what we needed.

Andrey

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 10:36 PM, Jonathan Fernatt <fernattj at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 2:49 PM, harbor235 <harbor235 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Anyone out there have experience with Riverbed Steelhead products?
> > Do they improve TCP performance over WAN links? is it worth the price?
> >
> >
> > mike
> >
>
> I've had good experiences with both Riverbed Steelhead and Cisco WAAS
> products. Both have a very short ROI. I think either are well worth the
> price.
>
> Jon
>

-- 
Andrey Khomyakov
[khomyakov.andrey at gmail.com]