Riverbed SteelHead

When COVID hit we really felt we were remote ready. Although our remote options were good, our Riverbed Steelhead allow our large files to be workable where they were not before. A 20 minute file opening time was cut to only 1.5 minutes bringing us back to office like work conditions. Since then it has only helped to streamline our operations.

We use Riverbed Steelheads at all of our sites (around 10). They are mainly used to optimise SMB traffic from file servers. This allows us to have near local performance for opening word documents and PDFs. It also helps with Exchange Mailboxes, with a handy feature that continues to sync mail onto the Riverbed Unit even when the client is turned off.

Riverbed Steelhead is used within our organization for the global acceleration of all applications and additionally for our customers as a managed service. For this reason, we designed a product based on Riverbed and named it Managed WAN Acceleration Service. Our customers are buying that service and we keep the hardware up and running and in service.

Our organization uses Riverbed Steelhead devices between our Production site and our Disaster Recovery site. It has drastically improved the throughput of our WAN connection between these locations. Our 100mb connection is often able to carry 800+mb of compressed and optimized data. Additionally, with 11 remote locations, we use the steelhead mobile controller to optimized traffic between our Production site and remote users. This dramatically improves the end user experience over VPN connections.

Steelhead is used to limit the bandwidth usage for our remote offices.

We have Riverbed Steelhead deployed across our global organization. We use it to optimize traffic, which allows us to use lower MPLS bandwidth than otherwise needed, saving us thousands of dollars. We also use it to analyze traffic flows.