Steelhead and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN each offer unique strengths for tech buyers. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN seems to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive feature set and robust performance.
Features: Steelhead offers effective WAN optimization, ease of use, and competitive pricing and support options. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN provides comprehensive security features, robust network management capabilities, and advanced functionalities that users find worth the investment.
Room for Improvement: Steelhead could improve scalability, reporting features, and enhance user feedback mechanisms. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN needs more intuitive management tools, simplified system configurations, and better user guidance to address the complexity of the system.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Steelhead users report straightforward deployment processes but mixed reviews about customer service. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is considered complex to deploy due to advanced configurations, but generally receives positive feedback for responsive customer support.
Pricing and ROI: Steelhead is favored for its competitive setup costs and faster ROI. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, despite higher initial costs, delivers significant long-term value through its extensive feature set, justifying its pricing to many users.
Without Steelhead, we would have spent much more on bandwidth costs.
Cisco's ongoing reorganizations have affected the quality of technical support, which varies depending on the engineer handling cases.
Steelhead's support is generally good for typical issues yet can be time-consuming during complex problem-solving across teams, particularly for Active Directory integration.
Cisco SD-WAN is highly scalable and can be expanded to more than 10,000 sites.
The ease of configuration and features like zero-touch provisioning enhance the scalability of Cisco SD-WAN, especially in disaster recovery situations.
It allows us to maximize use from our MPLS providers by handling traffic efficiently across phased deployments.
While some software-related issues and bugs were encountered, they did not cause the whole environment to crash.
It's quite stable and provides all necessary alerts if something is wrong.
Including more features like integrating with Splunk for monitoring vulnerabilities would help eliminate the need for other SOC solutions.
It would help if Riverbed could prevent such drastic impacts during updates.
Its pricing is justifiable due to the comprehensive solution it offers.
It is also relatively cost-effective for smaller businesses when using the Meraki version.
Buying the hardware initially is costly, but yearly maintenance and licenses are not as expensive.
Security is standard compliant, eliminating config drift that was prevalent before manual configurations.
Integration with Cisco ISE, Cisco Firewalls, and other Cisco solutions is beneficial.
Functions like acting as an NTP server, DNS, DHCP, and auto-optimization mode enhance efficiency.
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN serves to connect remote offices, reduce MPLS costs, and facilitate cloud and internet access while providing secure connectivity and centralized management for hybrid networks.
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is leveraged for secure connectivity, load balancing, VPN, centralized network management, and migrating from traditional networks to SD-WAN. It supports hybrid networks, enabling centralized management across branches and data centers, improving security, and optimizing bandwidth usage. Industries such as banking and retail benefit from its capabilities for secure and efficient network management.
What are the main features of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN?Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN's implementation in banking enhances secure transaction communication between branches and data centers. Retailers utilize it to ensure steady connectivity for point-of-sale systems and inventory management. Organizations benefit from centralized management, making it easier to handle networks across multiple locations.
Steelhead is the leading network optimization and application performance solution chosen by over 30,000 organizations worldwide. The performance of networks and applications directly impacts business productivity. Riverbed draws from nearly two decades of experience in driving network and application performance over Wide Area Networks with its flagship offering, SteelHead. SteelHead delivers the underlying technology that helps enterprises of all sizes maximize the efficiency and performance of the networks and applications used to run modern business.
SteelHead is proven to dramatically speed up the performance of applications anywhere in the organization while delivering the best end-user experience even under sub optimal network conditions. Reduce bandwidth utilization by up to 95%, deferring costly network bandwidth upgrades. Increase performance by up to 100x for on-premises applications.
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