Tell Us What You Think of Riverbed’s Steelhead

We have looked at, tested, and installed all the main WDS units. Blue Coat, Cisco, and Juniper. All fail to deliver the base functionality they promise.

Riverbed is the one manufacturer that actually delivers exactly what they promise with both the Appliance based models and the new Steelhead mobile client.

We are very pleased with the level of acceleration that we experience!!

I work for a fortune 500 company in the O&G industry. We have used and deployed as an enterprise solution Riverbed's Steelhead devices globally.
We currently have 150 devices and are deploying more every month.
The advantages to deploying Steelhead devices in locations with limited and costly bandwidth have proved a cost savings and value to our company from day 1 of implementing.

The ease of use and scalability of the Steelheads offers large to small locations the ability to implement the technology, not to mention being able to reuse the devices when a project ends and another begins.

I am a true believer and supporter of Riverbeds Steelheads for over 4 years now..

They are simply amazing devices. We use SQL log shipping across a T-1 for SAP backup once an hour. Pre-Riverbed the jobs sometimes would run for more than an hour. Post-Riverbed it rarely takes longer than five minutes.

Print jobs across the WAN (T-1 links) are 98% optimized. The printing just works faster.

I shared the CD drive on my computer and RDP'd to a remote server. I installed SQL 2005 from the CD on my computer across the Riverbedded WAN and it took the same amount of time as a local installation. It couldn't be done before. (This was during the Riverbed testing phase. We since removed all remote SQL servers because they don't need to be local any more.)

When we moved the first File and Print server from a plant to HQ, people asked us why we didn't move it on schedule. They saw no difference in accessing network shares than they did before the move and thought we hadn't done it yet.

If you're looking to replace remote servers, don't. Pop in a few of these devices and your life will be a lot easier.

JJ

We have 18 Riverbed appliances deployed on links ranging from 1.5 Mbps to 18 Mbps. They have allowed us to run offices of up to 15 people with out a local server. We regularly see optimization rates of 10x with our serverless sites. We are using replication to backup our remote servers to a disk array at our corporates office. We have set the replication software so that it will throttle the data transfer at 24% of a T3 on our T1 connected sites and do not see more than 25% of the actual T1 used during heavy resyncing of the data.

We looked at WAN acceleration as a necessary component of our network infrastructure, to make the network more agile in meeting the needs of the organization. Riverbed has not let us down - we have 20 devices and 30 mobile installs.

We looked at several vendors from Packeteer to Juniper - none of them came even close to matching Riverbed's performance or ease of installation and maintenance. They just work and they work well.

I work for a multi-national organization with offices in Washington DC, Bratislava (Slovakia), Belgrade (Serbia), Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Bucharest (Romania), and Ankara (Turkey).

Some of these locations have poor Internet service - with latency up to 350ms in some places.

When I came to this job two years ago, I set out to create a global network with a multi-mesh VPN architecture. The use of Steelheads were central to this architecture.

We have now been using Steelheads for 8 months and they have been flawless. Although I understand how their technology works, there still seems to be a certain element of magic.

Just to give one example, our web-based CRM works over two ports. Without the Steelheads, the CRM doesn't work from most offices (the latency is just too much). But with the Steelheads, CRM traffic is accelerated over 90%, working nearly as fast as in the home office.

In the end, these Steelheads are a HUGE cost savings to my organization. Having Internet connections fast enough to equal the performance I get from the Steelheads would be cost prohibitive. The price of each appliance in each office is easily less than one year's ISP payments for a connection of equal speed.

One thing that really sets Riverbed apart is their stellar service and support. When I am in Europe and call at off-hours, I always get someone and they are happy to help. Their level of expertise is impressive.

To have a product with this this level of service and quality makes it a no-brainer decision for me. I know I sound a bit biased and I am -- when a product makes you a hero in your organization, you are happy to put in a good word.

In order to consolidate our distributed servers in our 40 offices across Ontario we needed something to enhance our DSL based network. After reviewing the various products we chose to field test the Riverbed's Steelhead product because of its elegant simplicity. By that I meant the fact that we didn't need to make any network changes and if it failed it failed over to hardwire. The performance factors we achieved were more than we expected. Users immediately noticed the improvement in accessing email and didn't perceive any degradation after we centralized their local file services. The other big advantage was the simple installation procedures. Our remote offices have no IT support and staff with limited technical expertise in most office. In almost all cases we had the Steelhead installed successfully by administrative staff.

We are now getting upwards of 20 times performance on all of links and more on some.

The tests were successful and implementation across all offices was completed last January. I don't think our users would let us remove them now.

We have a global deployment of Riverbed Steelhead's in 20 location 13 countries across the world. They are the key for us to deliver LAN performance to our users in remote locations.

We have a three data centre design and therefore no local services in each office. without the Steelheads this design would fail and my users would screen and I would be sacked.

We looked at Silverpeak Cisco and Riverbed and it was Riverbed that best matched our business and techncial requirements.

They just start delivering out of the box. What more can I say.

We are a growing mid-size engineering firm with 10 offices. All of our offices have Steelheads in place and as we add new offices, a Steelhead is standard equipment. Using the Steelheads has allowed us to centralize our e-mail and several databases while greatly enhancing the ability to do interoffice work, even with large engineering files.

When we first evaluated Riverbed, we were looking to improve upon our Peribit (now Juniper) devices. We put the latest Juniper product up against the Riverbed Steelheads and it really wasn't a contest at the time. It was obvious Riverbed was better, but we weren't sure they'd be able to continue their market leadership. But with each new release of their OS (RiOS), they've added features to keep them in the market lead. For example, with the latest release, RiOS 5.0, they've introduced Riverbed Services Platform (RSP). This allows us to run things such as a print server from the Steelhead itself, further reducing our need for servers, especially in small offices. I look forward to seeing how Riverbed will expand this offering and continue to innovate in this rapidly changing market.

We tested Riverbed, Cisco and Juniper. Riverbed deliverd on the promise. Since then we have installed 19 units all of which were as easy to deploy as we were led to believe. Riverbed accommodated us on in-house training for our staff. They have been available whenever we had questions and have offered their assistance on a regular basis. They are the REAL DEAL. Their product deliveres as advertised and then some. We couldn't be more pleased with our choice.