riverbed steelhead

Joel Maslak jmaslak at antelope.net
Thu Apr 21 19:36:36 UTC 2011


On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 12:49 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?
>

I'll let others answer the specific question about Riverbed.  I've heard
plenty of good things about them though.

(forgive me if this is extremely basic)  If the problem is that someone
downloading a big file slows the whole office down, there may be cheaper
ways of solving this.  Assuming your WAN links are private connections (not
VPN over internet), I'd also suggest before spending money that you ensure
you are doing some sort of fair queuing with RED/WRED enabled.  This will
ensure with on a network dominated by typical business TCP that one user
can't monopolize a circuit.  I'd also ensure that you are not sending bits
faster than your provider will allow (beyond your burstable bit rate) by
ensuring your bandwidth selections on your interfaces are set correctly.
You might be able to fix your users' concerns/complaints just by a few lines
of router config (and if you're using anything beyond home routers, your
routers probably already support these things).  In my experience, the
problem isn't that the line is too small for the workload, but rather that
bulk transfers keep everyone from doing work over it - that's where fair
queuing and WRED come in.  If you've already done this, than please ignore
this suggestion.  :)

-- 
Joel Maslak



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