San Francisco based Riverbed Technology offers Steelhead, a WAN optimization solution. The new SteelHead 90 series appliances are designed to provide performance, security, scalability, data movement efficiency, and resilient networking.
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VMware SD-WAN
Score 8.5 out of 10
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VMware SD-WAN (formerly VeloCloud) aims to deliver high-performance, reliable branch access to cloud services, private data centers, and SaaS-based enterprise applications. VeloCloud was acquired by VMware in 2018.
VMware SD WAN is a great solution for tying multiple locations together that are not physically located close. The link aggregation used in the technology allows for quicker failover to redundant connections, which makes the surface traffic seem to be uninterrupted. If planning to connect multiple locations while utilizing the existing internet, Veloclouds SDWAN provides stable and accurate aggregation of connections that provide a good sense of stability for the price.
VMware SD-WAN has great usability. We have had a positive experience with the solution. It has helped solved a number of issues with our network such as visibility in user usage, application usage, and prioritizing critical application network traffic. VMware SD-WAN user interface is also very easy to understand and configure.
There are still some glitches that need to be worked out. As an example, I rebooted a device at one of our branch locations and it just died. That should never have happened, and I've only seen this happen when a company needs to improve hardware on some of their lower-end models.
We tested Cisco eleven years ago in parallel with Riverbed in a PoC. The Cisco configuration was very complex and sticky based on the location. The Riverbed configuration is flexible based on the whole storage. A software client for devices like laptops or tablets is not available for Cisco WAAS, therefore we selected Riverbed based on a PoC.
At the time we made our decision to move forward with VeloCloud, Cisco Viptela and Cisco Meraki were the two players we compared against. Cisco's offerings were very customizable when using Viptela, but there was a big learning curve to implement. Meraki at the time was a lot simpler, but we needed the ability to customize some features in order to implement SD-WAN in our environment. VeloCloud was the perfect solution during our POC as it satisfied our needs.
Ease of deployment: the amount of time saved when adding additional sites to the solution, especially when you have a profile already built and when you add a new VC you just associate that profile with that appliance. Again, in a matter of minutes, you can have a new site up and running.
Since there is not true firewall built-in, you would have to either purchase a third-party firewall or the virtual firewall that is supported by Velocloud.
