Being a self-confessed "Cisco fan" wasn't enough to convince Adam Rasner, director of corporate network services at Rayonier, to give Cisco the prize of consolidating locations at the forestry 
and real estate company. Instead, that contract went to Riverbed Technologies and its Steelhead WAFS appliance (compare products), according to a story in SearchStorage.com. The company chose Riverbed after a 30-day bake-off between a Steelhead appliance and Cisco's Wide Area Application Service. The story says Rayonier tested a 10Mb PowerPoint file over the 30-day period and found that the Riverbed appliance showed an 85% to 90% average data reduction rate, while the Cisco product averaged 77%. Response time opening the PowerPoint was also 35% faster with Riverbed's product, according to the story.
The story also cites Rasner as saying configuration problems with Cisco's product also turned him off. He said 15% of every quote he received for the WAAS product was for professional services to set it up, but Riverbed had no such charges.
Rayonier runs 250 servers spread over multiple locations serving 3Tb of data before the consolidation.
Do the results of the bake-off and Rasner's assessment of Cisco's quote sound familiar to you?
* See Network World's Clear Choice Test of WAN acceleration gear from Riverbed, Cisco, Silver Peak and Blue Coat, which came to similar conclusions. Plus: Check out Network Word's IT Application Acceleration and WAN Optimization Buyer's Guide that has over 60 products listed and detailed editorial content that outlines the technology behind the numbers, best practices and market trends.
More Cisco Subnet items:
* Win an iPod Touch; win a copy of 'Firewall Fundamentals' book
* Three levels to Cisco's converged mobility plans
* Cisco Virtual Switch System wows Network World testers
* Cisco: Let them eat virtual cake (and other Cisco goodies at CES 2008)
* Choosing the Right Remote Access VPN: 9 Important Questions
* Chipset maker gives clues to Cisco's 802.11n moves
Go to Cisco Subnet for more Cisco news, blogs, discussion forums, security alerts, book giveaways, and more.
Network World's IT Buyer's Guide: Cisco products
Subscribe to Network World's Cisco Alert, which includes a weekly digest of all Cisco Subnet items
The Cisco Subnet blog is the official blog of the Network World Cisco Subnet community, managed by Editor Linda Leung. Cisco Subnet is the independent voice of Cisco customers and is your gateway to daily Cisco news, blogs, opinion, books, prize giveaways and more. Visit the Cisco Subnet home page daily and while you are there, subscribe to the Cisco Alert e-mail newsletter, which includes news and views generated by the Cisco Subnet community as well as Cisco-related stories on Network World and elsewhere on the Web.
(WAN community)The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
|
|
We are seeing Cisco lose to
We are seeing Cisco lose to Riverbed over and over. They just aren't ready for the WAN acceleration space yet.
Cisco vs Riverbed
Justin Lofton
VP of Engineering
Tredent Data Systems, Inc.
http://www.tredent.com
Why didn't you post the rest of the story?
Performance is only ONE of many items to consider when deciding what wanopt solution to deploy:
Cisco officials also said their product is more transparent to existing network infrastructures, and at least one former Riverbed user agrees. According to Mark Drake, network engineer for hospital operator Healthcare Management Associates Inc., (HMA) security practices at his company made Riverbed a no-go.
Riverbed performs a process called Network Address Translation (NAT) to "net" all the traffic it optimizes under one IP address, which Drake said would violate a policy of separation between each branch facility for patient privacy reasons. HMA used Riverbed for transmitting backups between AS400 systems, but had to put in a dedicated T1 line to do so for security reasons. "Moving that over to Cisco will save us $2,500 a month in bandwidth costs," he said.
and the final bit of the article
Riverbed's senior product marketing manager Harold Byun responded that "it sounds like he was probably swayed to the Cisco side by some salesmanship -- if users want to do IP address accounting, they can do so on the LAN side of our appliances."
Tunneling breaks network functions
And it's not just accounting. If you use distributed firewalls, IDS's, or anything that need to examine the IP packets, products like Riverbeds will have to be tunneled right on through.
Your design choices are either place the Steelhead at the edge of your network outside your own equipment--ie adjacent to the WAN router--or drop it into a DMZ.
Also, 10-15% is piddly. You wouldn't even notice that in real-time.
Bahhahahhaha!!!
Cisco is a joke. With time, more and more companies are going to realize how their products are overhyped, underengineered, and overpriced.
The marketing gorilla loses again! Bahhahaha!
Riberbed sinks to a new low
It's really too bad that Riverbed has to resort to shameful marketing tactics like this.
Riverbed's solution isn't
Riverbed's solution isn't transparent. If you already do QoS on your WAN, or you need high availability, it is NOT a good fit. Riverbed nearly (if you want their "approved" design) requires an inline setting. Who on earth would put a single, cheap piece of hardware between a large LAN and the routers feeding that site? Cisco allows the use of a non-inline WCCP approach which fits this scenario nicely. If the device fails, your entire site does not fall off the WAN.
In addition we've done a bake-off on the higher form both products, which included not just file transfers but application acceleration. Despite both sides arguing they could do it all well, Cisco had the edge when it came to most of the applications we really worry about, notably Oracle applications.
At this point it's worth a bake-off if you are looking at the product. The winner here isn't as cut and dry as this article presents, nor as one sided as either of these vendors would have you believe.
If the Riverbed were to
If the Riverbed were to completely fail on an off-chance, just like almost every in-line product made by almost any vendor you have heard of, the device fails to wire so there is no interruption in service.
Cisco's own implementation of off-line WCCP will fry the cpu cycles of its own routers. Performance will quickly and continually degrade.
If you want options and something that works well with Oracle, Juniper is the best choice. It can do inline, with fail-to-wire of course and can also has a few off-line options such as WCCP. Juniper's WX running WCCP will not save the Cisco router from certain destruction though. You will probably need a better router.
I wouldn't consider Cisco for any reason for WAN optimization. My first choice is a tie, Juniper or Riverbed, depends on your applications and your own bake-off, your needs, etc. Second choice would be Expand. My third choice, if I was forced to make it, would be Cisco.
What a LIE
Completely untrue. The truth is any INLINE card has to detect failure of the software or OS and go into bypass mode. This will drop packets. Oh yeah...and because the riverbed product TUNNELS, what do you think happens to EVERY SINGLE CONNECTION being optimized - they RESET. This does not occur with WCCP. Most of the connections will retransmit and the router will have the opportunity to resend them in an unoptimized fashion. Clearly a better design.
Inline cards also disrupt on "activation" when they come out of passthrough mode to being managed by the software and os. This disruption can take some time.
WCCP will not fry the CPU...maybe 3-6% overhead at most. This is just a plain lie or the author clearly shows how little they know.
Cisco can also do inline, WCCP or PBR. WCCP is still the best way to redirect any kind of traffic. Bluecoat has been using it for years for web-caching.
Again, the only reason CPU utilization would be high would be an undersized router to begin with (WAAS or not).
The ISR's are capable of running fw, ids, routing, voice and waas concurrently without a problem.
Juniper is transaprent
If you need transparency, Juniper is your choice. The Juniper WX has four different kinds of tunneling. These different options allow you to work with probes, VPN's, see IP addresses, etc. Whatever your requirements, Juniper probably has you covered.
Riverbed can also do off-path as well, btw. And is also fail-to-wire, so your WAN failures are probably your own fault.
People who are unknowledgeable on this subject and who only read Cisco marketing materials should stay out of these discussions.
Post new comment