Thread: Riverbed Steelhead Products

With globalization, organizations are now not confined to a single place but spread
across large geographical areas. This means they have a sizeable workforce that's always on the move. As these employees need continuous and fast connectivity to critical applications like ERP, products such as WAN accelerators are the need of the hour. We received a number of WAN accelerators from Riverbed, which we deployed under various scenarios to see how they can enhance enterprise WAN connectivity.

Steelhead appliances for WAN acceleration are powered by a software platform named RiOS 5.5 (Riverbed Optimization System).At the core of RiOS lie four types of optimization techniques. Here's a brief explanation of each:

Data streaming is achieved by reducing transmission of redundant bytes and depending on organizational needs, prioritizing data. This leads to a considerable reduction of bandwidth requirements (up to 95%).

Transport streaming reduces TCP traffic by reducing the number of TCP packets required to transfer data thus optimizing bandwidth usage.

Application Streaming is specific to an organization's applications, and one can optimize a number of protocols like CIFS, NFS, HTTP, HTTPS, etc.



Finally,Management Streaming helps if organization is using multiple Steel head appliances, as management of these devices can be done centrally. This reduces overhead and saves man-hours.

Some applications accelerated by Steelhead appliances include Microsoft's Office, Lotus Notes and Oracle IIi. RiOS 5.5 also supports virtualization, giving a fascinating dimension to Steel head appliances. It means now a single Steelhead appliance can run five virtual machines (VMware-based). So, an organization can virtually run firewalls, mail server, ete.

Test setup

We used two standard machines acting as client and server with a WAN emula tor between them. We emulated the WAN using 'Network Nightmare' appliance, which can simulate the WAN and one can easily configure bandwidth and latency on this device. We simulated the WAN by setting the bandwidth to 128 Kbps with a latency of 100;milliseconds. We calculated the time taken to transfer files from the client to server. Here's the list of file transfer scenarios carried out on each set of WAN accelerators.