riverbed steelhead

Thu Apr 21 19:17:41 UTC 2011

I've had good experiences with the Riverbed appliances as well. Definitely a leader in my mind when compared to Cisco and Juniper although there are some new niche players that have good solutions depending on the details of your traffic and topology.

One note on the Riverbeds, if you're trying to monitor their effectiveness and the traffic thru them via netflow you'll need to put them in "application port transparency mode". I may have the name of the mode a little off (going from memory) but effectively it forces the TCP ports to remain consistent as the flows are tore down and reconstructed.

HTH,
Josh

-----Original Message-----
From: Stefan Fouant [mailto:sfouant at shortestpathfirst.net] 
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2011 1:58 PM
To: 'harbor235'; 'NANOG list'
Subject: RE: riverbed steelhead

> -----Original Message-----
> From: harbor235 [mailto:harbor235 at gmail.com]
> Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2011 2:50 PM
> To: NANOG list
> Subject: riverbed steelhead
> 
> Anyone out there have experience with Riverbed Steelhead products?
> Do they improve TCP performance over WAN links? is it worth the price?

I've had generally good experiences w/ Riverbed's Steelhead as well as
Juniper's WX Series product.  For certain types of applications, like email
and database replication you can expect to see pretty dramatic reductions in
throughput because of the technique of replacing symbols for otherwise long
strings of repeatable characters.  Also because of the local proxying
abilities with regards to TCP ACKs and such, you can also get better
pipelining of traffic...

As far as whether they are worth the price, this really boils down to a
proper Cost/Benefit analysis, but most of the ROI calculators show a return
after as little as just a few months. 

Stefan Fouant