Riverbed SteelHead vs. VMware SD-WAN

If you are dealing with large CAD files on a daily basis "remotely", Riverbed Steelhead makes your home office feel just like the office

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Effectively improves data throughput over VPN WAN connections.
• Seamless operation.
• Optimizes a variety of applications. Including, HTTPS, Citrix, Netapp SM and SV, Exchange, etc.

Incentivized

• VeloCloud is excellent at automatically choosing the best internet connection based on speed and quality.
• It provides a web based interface allows all our connections to be managed from anywhere in the world.
• Because VMware has a strong history in networking and is a name I can trust, we are able to confidently invest in their technology.

Incentivized

• A reduction in price is always welcomed
• Simplify and streamline advanced features and add-on pieces for more detailed traffic analysis
• Getting granularity into traffic behavior becomes confusing and very expensive

Incentivized

• They need to be a little clearer when it comes to licensing. And from the orchestrator, I should be able to see what licenses I currently have associated with every device and their expiration dates.
• I feel even though a VM firewall can be added to a specific appliance, a full UTM firewall built within the solution would be great.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Files now open a lot quicker, at near local speeds.
• We are able to respond to customers quicker as we can get access quicker.

Incentivized

• Inclusion of this product has led to our removal of old point to point and self managed wireless tower communication.
• Switching to Velocloud SDWAN allowed us to remove distributed repository style framework and embrace a newer option.
• Switching to SDWAN has already mitigated several instances of connections going down and the quick failover means there was no business interruption.

Incentivized