Steelhead Reviews

You should buy SteelHead for WAN optimization because it delivers more. WAN optimization is the process of increasing data throughput and improving the network and application performance over the WAN. This is what Riverbed SteelHead helps with. If you face a latency issue or slow application performance, go for this solution.

The first feature that is valuable is SDR, Scalable Data Referencing. Suppose you have two offices, one based in India and the other one is in the U.S., which is where the data center is. If an engineer is working from India and accessing an application from there, downloading or uploading files or folders over the file server or other applications, SDR will cache the data on the SteelHead device itself. The second time, he won't need to go via the WAN. He will be able to download the file locally. He will feel he is getting LAN-like speed over the WAN.

The second valuable feature is the compression.

The third valuable feature is the TCP optimization. Every time protocols are communicating with each other, every time they establish a connection, three is a three-way handshake. For UDP there is no handshaking because it is connection-less. But TCP does the three-way handshake before delivering any information to the application. The optimization feature caches a particular TCP connection and the next time a user uses that connection he will reach the destination easily.

Application response time and network performance could be improved.

Allot, an Israel-based organization, is offering DDoS attack prevention, not mitigation but prevention; threat response. If Riverbed would offer DDoS or IPS-type stuff, that would be great. Because we are deploying Riverbed in inline mode, we can easily take advantage of these kinds of features.

I have been working with Riverbed SteelHead for more than 15 years. I have a lot of experience with it. I have implemented it many times, both on-prem and in the cloud, around the world.

It is very stable. If you check the industry reviews, you will see that it is number-one for WAN optimization.

It is easily scalable. I have implemented it in SMBs and in enterprise-level companies.

Overall, Riverbed provides satisfactory support.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It is not complex. It is a very simple device. It is like an L2 device, and you can easily install it into a network. It can be deployed in inline mode, but there are some methods for deploying this appliance into a network. The first is the physical, meaning inline mode. The second is virtual. And the third is the server-side, where you can deploy this device with the switch nearest to the server, and the client-side is deployed in in-line mode.

Every SteelHead deployment always involves deploying two appliances. One appliance on its own will not work because SteelHead always works in pairs. If your organization has five branch offices, and one is the data center, you will need to deploy a SteelHead in each branch office to get the benefit of WAN optimization. 

The number of people needed for deployment depends on how far apart the locations are. If the locations are not very far apart, one person can fully deploy the product. If there are distant remote locations, you will need a person in each location.

The deployment time is three to four hours, maximum. It's very easy to install. You only need to run some commands, then go to the UI and do some configuration.

I would 100 percent advise others to implement this product. When potential customers ask us why they should buy SteelHead instead of just increasing their bandwidth from 10 Mbps to 20 Mbps, we tell them that doing so does not eliminate protocol chattiness. The reason behind this is that the TCP three-way handshake will happen at 10 Mbps and at 20 Mbps as well. If you have 20 applications in your environment and your users are accessing those applications, there is a lot of protocol chattiness going on. Upgrading bandwidth will not eliminate it. If you buy SteelHead, you can eliminate the protocol chattiness, and all the different kinds of handshaking. 

Every protocol is very chatty. CIFS, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, applications that are running on port 445, use a protocol that is very chatty as well.

Also, Riverbed recently started offering SD-WAN. The SteelConnect appliance delivers SD-WAN service and can easily provide routing, application visibility, security services, and WAN optimization. Riverbed has also started delivering a next-generation firewall which is completely an application firewall.

We primarily use the solution for the optimization of our WAN.

The solution has been very good since the beginning. It is quite reliable. 

It is very easy to install the solution. 

Technical support has been very good.

We would like the solution to be less expensive.

If the solution was more secure, that would be ideal.

The product should offer more integration capabilities. 

I've been using the solution for more than ten years at this point. It's been about a decade or more. I've used it for a long time. 

The solution has been very stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's a reliable product.

Currently what we have in the system can not support the software-defined networks, so I won't say it's scalable. However, newer iterations might be.

We currently have about 2,000 users on the solution.

We've dealt with technical support in the past and they have been okay. We're satisfied with how helpful and responsive they have been overall. 

The initial setup is not difficult. It's very simple and quite straightforward. A company shouldn't have trouble setting it up.

When the product was originally installed, it was not the lead. Therefore, I cannot speak to how long the deployment itself took.

We only have just a few people on staff that really manage the infrastructure at the moment. We don't need a big team.

The cost of the product is too high. We would like it to be lower. 

We pay a yearly licensing fee.

We are a customer and an end-user. We don't have a business relationship with the company itself. 

We are still using the CX 5070 across our sites. We have one in the system.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been very pleased with the solution and its capabilities over the years. 

I would recommend the product to others.

On-premises

The reports available through the interface are very helpful to understand how effective the solution is working. I was able to validate the data as well with other external monitoring tools.

The data reduction that we realize (>85% for our most common protocols) is amazing. This almost doubled our available bandwidth at our remote locations and when bandwidth restrictions exist already at remote sites, this was a huge business benefit.

The advertised “fail open” feature doesn’t work as expected. When upgrading and a reboot is necessary, I expected the traffic to still flow without a single packet loss. This was not the case unfortunately and neighborship was changed during the reboot. Granted, it was brief (about 7 seconds), but it still was not what I expected.

We've been using it for approximately nine years.

The deployment is pretty straightforward and pretty easy.

We've had no issues with the stability of the product.

There have been no issues it scaling it for our need.

Very high; the support team handling the Steelhead issues is very trained and knowledgeable on the product. At times, the request for logs and diags can be cumbersome.

It was straightforward.

In-house. My advice is to read the implementation guide cover to cover. It’s not a long read, but understanding it is necessary to avoid frustration.

It is somewhat costly but not nearly as costly as additional bandwidth every month.

We only looked at Riverbed.

In addition to the effective optimization we get out of this solution it integrates directly with some Riverbed SteelCentral monitoring tools we own.

Check out software-defined WAN solutions as well before any hardware solution. SD WAN acceleration solutions have likely improved quite a bit in the last few years.

• MPLS through OSPF
• VLAN

Through this product, we can easily find the bottlenecks and where the traffic occurs or generated in the network. It also helps to find the shortest path to send our data from source to destination through the MPLS network. Then, we can handle it through this technology.

Not all devices are available for creating the topology as per the need on your network, such as the three switch router or firewall in this product. Nor do they provide help for putting actual and exact data for creating devices as per requirement.

There have been no issues deploying it.

We have had some issues with licence acquisition following a hanging server or power issues. Sometimes it can take a long time to resolve the issue with Riverbed support.

We have had no issues

7/10

We also use OPNET Modeller Academic v14.0 which is free and is easily downloaded and installed on our system. With it, there is no proper way to create the topology unlike in OPNET SP Guru Network Planner 17.0. Things missing from it are the ability to create devices and the inability to create access permissions to upload to the network configuration to my existing network. These need to be uploaded though Wireshark tools, the router or other methods.

It's straightforward to implement.

We had some issues but they were resolved with the help of the vendor team.

Its licensing is for a single machine. If we want to use it on more than one machine, it doesn’t work following the install installed. This should be improved as the cost for a licence is very high and we are unable to purchase this product for using each user.

The primary use case of Steelhead is as a CDR application and a second use case is for optimization. We are global distributors for Riverbed and I'm a technical engineer.

Scalable data referencing is the most valuable feature developed by Riverbed. It's also great that you can optimize multiple applications and get better reporting. These days, everybody is looking for visibility and Steelhead enables you to see what's running on your network. You can easily filter the site, the name of an application, the port, source, or destination IP.

The application response time of the solution can be improved. 

I've been using this solution for 13 years. 

The stability is good overall. 

The solution is scalable, I've deployed it for more than 20,000 users.

We've had a good experience with technical support. They have a toll-free number and are happy to carry out a remote session to troubleshoot any issues.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy. 

Licensing costs are reasonable. 

We've compared with other vendors but none have the scalable data referencing (SDR) feature, the mobile client software to optimize for roaming users.

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

1. Inbound QoS
2. Outbound QoS
3. Path Selection
4. SSL optimization
5. The breadth of scope in the “Reports” tab….(Top Talkers, Current Connections, Application Visibility, Optimized throughput, Traffic Summary and many more)

By utilizing the RSP slots we can create a virtual domain controller and/or member server at our remote sites to take care of DHCP, DNS, LDAP auth, Server Print Queues, etc.

If no local file shares (Storage) are needed this is a nice way to save money on hardware and maintenance costs.

SteelCentral Controller global QoS policy should be able to be implemented from the CLI vice only the Web GUI.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

It is very good at optimizing WAN traffic and it has so many more features on top of that which help global enterprises monitor, identify and police traffic by application type, IP subnet, source, and/or destination.  Amazingly efficient tool to use when troubleshooting WAN issues..(customer complaints and more).

Mainly "generic features" used for data reduction and TCP window optimization. Some applicative specific optimizations used.

Great added value for replication flows between far away datacenters : => Data to transfer dramatically reduced, lowering WAN links costs. => TCP window scalling permitting to accelerate WAN transfers for old systems not using this feature natively and also for recent systems using less optimized TCP window scalling.

Applicative specifics optimizations shall always be improved.

2 years

Regarding system, upgrades issues occurs with old generations (XX20) but they are now fixed. Regarding hardware, disks sometimes crash on long time installed appliances when it is powercycled but it is the bad side of using magnetic disks to lower big storage space.

Not really.

Not really.

Customer Service: Customer service is really efficient. Riverbed TAC access is quick and easy.Technical Support: Sometimes, TAC responses must be challenged but the service is globally valuable.

No.

In-house implementation after a vendor team POC and an in-house lab.

Cisco WAAS

Aside from optimizing WAN connections between our remote offices and the home office, the charts/real-time graphs proved to be valuable during troubleshooting over-utilization issues. Easily, we were able to determine source/destination and how much data they have used.

We've increased throughput between remote offices, increasing our efficiency.

It provides easy-to-read data to review troubles within the network which allowed us to resolve the issue much quicker.

Personally, my expertise with this device I feel is too low to determine what areas could be improved. I did use this device for 3+ years while with another job and administered the web interface and even jumped into the CLI with support at times. However, I have no professional training.

3+ years

No issues with deployment of this hardware. Although I believe it may not be recommended the device is essentially plug-n-play, meaning the database will determine what networks to optimize without you having to specify every subnet.

At times, like all network devices there were issues, but support was there to help us understand/resolve any issues that we could not handle. Even if it meant RMA, we would receive a new Steelhead the next day and be able to replace it.

I did not deal much with scaling as the network didn't grow while I was there, but we did have the Riverbed CMC (I believe is the acronym - central management console?) Having this would have made scaling easy, I assume.

Customer Service:

Customer service was what I would expect out of every company. They took care of us when we needed them to, including replacing the device with minimal questions.

Technical Support:

Tech support was great as well, they were able to remote into my computer and then use the putty session from there to gather information needed or resolve the issue.

I am not aware of the company using any other solution. When I joined they were already using Riverbed Steelhead.

I was not there for the initial setup, but I did replace one remote office steelhead and that was easy to do

I implemented through a in-house one, no rating to give to a vendor team. We handled everything if it was over our heads we had their tech support.

I would not know this information as I was only dealing with the administration of the device. These devices were extremely valuable as when one went down or optimization turned off, everyone noticed.

I would not have valuable / correct information on pricing or licensing as I did not handle that portion. I'm sure like anything, if you want all the bells and whistles expect to pay some $$.

No other options were evaluated, to my knowledge. I am not even aware of other WAN optimizers. I'm sure there are some, when the time comes I'm sure I'll do some research.

No additional comments or advice regarding Riverbed Steelhead. The devices were great, and proved to be a very valuable asset to the company.