Overview
Companies of all sizes depend on the Riverbed Steelhead product family to accelerate the performance of applications over the WAN.
Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile deliver the highest performing and most scalable WAN optimization solution available, overcoming both bandwidth and latency problems to deliver LAN-like performance to branch offices or mobile workers across the globe.
With Riverbed, users are more productive, data moves faster and applications perform seamlessly. Riverbed Technology brings the world closer, changing the way people work.
Accelerating Applications for the Global Workforce
Riverbed Steelhead products accelerate application performance and data transfer over the wide area network (WAN), overcoming bandwidth and geographical limitations to improve productivity and enable global collaboration. With Riverbed, file transfers that once took hours or minutes, now take minutes or seconds.
Workers today need access to information wherever and whenever they work – whether at corporate headquarters, a branch office on another continent, or on-site with a customer. The demand for anywhere / anytime access to data puts tremendous strain on IT to deliver an increasing number of applications over the WAN.
Riverbed’s award-winning WAN optimization solutions strategically enable IT to centralize and reduce operational overhead and expense, while improving end-user satisfaction. Riverbed’s products have been proven in some of the most demanding and complex networks in the world, with thousands of customers deploying Steelhead WAN optimization solutions.
The Riverbed Difference: Speed, Scalability, Simplicity
Speed
Riverbed Steelhead products address performance limitations using a multitiered optimization approach. Unlike older generation technologies, such as wide area file services (WAFS) or file caching, Steelhead products optimize traffic using a patented application agnostic algorithm to achieve massivescale data deduplication. The Riverbed solution layers TCP and application protocol optimization on top of its data reduction technique to deliver a multi-tiered optimization strategy that sets the technological high-bar for WAN optimization, and delivers unparalleled application acceleration over the WAN.
Scalability
Riverbed’s universal data store provides greater scalability than per-peer storage models and reduces WAN optimization storage requirements. By avoiding the per-peer storage limitation, companies can easily scale to hundreds of sites with any-to-any connectivity. Steelhead products also utilize a TCPbased transport, which avoids the pitfalls of running a proprietary transport on a shared network. The Steelhead product family supports up to 12 Gbps of optimized throughput and one million concurrent connections. The product family is one of the most scalable in the industry.
Simplicity
Companies can deploy Steelhead products in a matter of minutes. Steelhead deployments can be performed from a single console with virtually plug-andplay installations, and the Riverbed solution does not require any changes to clients and servers nor the use of specific routing protocols. Steelhead products have been proven in a broad range of network environments alongside VoIP, video conferencing, and QoS, giving customers flexibility and seamless integration with the existing infrastructure.
The Serverless Branch Office
Companies are approaching consolidation and virtualization of IT in branch offices in two ways. First, moving servers and storage out of the branch and into data centers where it can be more efficiently aggregated and managed, and then delivering access back to end users across the WAN. Second, taking local branch office servers and virtualizing them to run directly on the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) with VMware on the Steelhead appliances that are already deployed in every site, for edge services like printing or security. With no more complex build outs or remote servers to buy, install and manage, branches get set up faster and leaner, administrative overhead decreases, and users are more productive.
