A More All-Encompassing Approach
Unlike point solutions that may solve one part of the wide area application performance problem—such as data compression, QoS, or TCP optimization—Riverbed’s Wide Area Data Services (WDS) on the Steelhead appliances address all of the following at once:

• Application acceleration
• WAN optimization
• Wide area file services (WAFS)
• QoS and traffic shaping
• Web caching

Optimized WAN Bandwidth
Though a viable solution, typical WAN optimization products only reduce network traffic by ten or twenty percent—usually by adding more bandwidth or performing data compression. But Riverbed’s wide area data services (WDS) solution can reduce network utilization typically by 60 to 95%—overcoming standard WAN inefficiencies.

Wider Pipes Are Nice But They Don’t Always Increase Speed
From here to Europe, the standard round trip file transfer time is 160–180 milliseconds. A typical LAN performance averages just 15 milliseconds. But increasing your bandwidth does not mean faster file transfer—it simply means that more people can use it. Just as adding lanes to a highway doesn’t change the speed limit. You need a way to increase your application speed to really experience significant improvement.

How Does It Work?
In its simplest form, the technology performs transaction prediction to eliminate the length of TCP communications. Take email for example. If I send 25 different emails to 25 different recipients, they may not seem the same but there are still commonalities (such as data in the source code) within the application. But Riverbed has patented an algorithm that removes repetitive traffic; every time I send that file, traffic is deduplicated and application speed is improved.

TCP Application Acceleration. How Fast?
Fast. Very fast. Typical results range from between 5 to 50 times and in many cases up to 100 times faster across a broad range of applications. Consider the following:

Mobile Users Benefit Too
With Riverbed’s Steelhead Mobile solution, mobile users can access data and applications with the same ease as LAN and WAN workers. The application runs on the mobile worker’s machine (connecting to the Steelhead appliance in the data center) so that when he or she connects to the VPN with an optimized connection, the amount of data they need to send over the WAN and the “chattiness” of transport and application protocols is reduced, resulting in faster application speeds and improved user productivity.

Faster Backup & Replication
Riverbed also offers some improvements in the backup and replication arena as well. Now intensive WAN backups don’t have to cripple your network. Instead of running backups that last all night, you can decrease them significantly. Some customers have seen 24–hour reductions in the very first pass. Riverbed also has dedicated partnerships with many WAN backup providers, including Net App, CommVault, EMC, and Veritas so you can use your vendor of choice without any compatibility issues.

Centralized Management
Once you implement multiple Steelhead appliances, you may want to consider a centralized reporting structure to simplify deployment, configuration, and management. Riverbed’s centralized management controller (CMC) offers global management capabilities from a single web–based administration point. Administrators can run advanced reports on WAN traffic levels, application performance, TCP metrics, and much more.

Easy to Implement
What’s great about this solution is that it’s network agnostic and very easy to implement. How easy? Out of the box, offline configuration can take as little as 15 minutes and implementation can take as little as 1–3 seconds! Then you can start receiving immediate improvements. It’s not network magic, but what it does do is make an inefficient protocol efficient—without changing the protocol itself.

Simple to Configure
Where other solutions may have you bolting additional line cards into another device, Riverbed is a dedicated appliance–based solution.

What’s the Catch?
You have to look hard for one. Someone could ask, “Yeah but aren’t I adding another single point of failure on my network?” Simply put, no. Riverbed offers multiple deployment designs and all platforms are embedded with fail–open network cards so even if someone pulled power from the wall, your network would never go down; the device acts as a “piece of wire,” ensuring network uptime. Riverbed has an extensive product offering ideal for HA designs.

What about Licensing?
Another advantage: if you purchase a Riverbed box, there’s no additional expensive application licensing required. No surprises such as: “Oh you’re running SQL, you need to buy an optimization license.” The steelhead appliance can do ten things right out of the box.

What Kind of Organization Benefits Most?
The Riverbed solution is especially good for companies that routinely send the same kinds of information over and over. So it’s great for any company running a WAN—and especially remarkable for companies with lots of office locations, that process large data files (such as CAD, MS Office docs, etc.), or that routinely experience slow email response times.

Customizable to Your Network
The Riverbed appliance is sized depending on your network: number of users, bandwidth, TCP connections, etc. That said, we recommend getting a certified engineer to do a site survey or proof of concept to determine the best configuration. Simply put, we think Riverbed’s WDS solution stacks up—and in many ways outpaces—other solutions in the marketplace.

Please call GreenPages for more information 1–800–989–2989.