Steelhead Reviews

I've found the appliance to be the most valuable. Also, it's easy to use and configure.

It's helped to reduce WAN traffic by approximately 60%.

I would like to see more IP services, perhaps aligned better Netflow stats. The Central Management Console (CMC) newly named SteelCentral Controller (SCC) has rudimentary netflow capabilities, but it doesn’t have particularly in-depth data. I realize the need for a dedicated NetFlow environment but because the SteelHead technology deal with flow and not IP this is not capable.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

The SteelHead product is very good, easy to configure, however a home page which can be altered would enhance the gui 

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.

• Easy deployment
• Fantastic bandwidth optimization
• Low maintenance requirements

It's improved the stability and throughput of the WAN, especially for remote small branches with low link speed. Reduced impact to network performance from Windows updates deployment on users PCs.

Better logic of the web GUI.

I've been using it for three years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We had some stability problems with a few devices. Probably RAM leaking issue by some processes which caused problem with remote access to the devices trough SSH or web.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

I haven't had much experience with Riverbed Technical Support since our devices are managed by outsourcing company.

We previously used Cisco WAAS solution.

The deployment of the Riverbed products is very easy and straightforward.

I implemented it myself. The advice is just to follow the vendor instructions.

Check your network requirements before deploying one of the Riverbed devices. CX255M is more than enough for most of the branch sites with 10-50 people.

We did a data center migration for one client between two countries in Latin America. The challenge for this company was that they needed to send a large amount of traffic from Argentina to Mexico in a very short time. Without Riverbed WAN Optimization, it took one hour to send one gig of traffic, but with Riverbed, one gig of traffic was sent in five minutes. From one hour to five minutes, it had a big impact.

A feature we like is data streamlining. Riverbed does packet deduplication, packet compression and uses something like simple data referencing to compress the data. If one gig of traffic is sent to one link, that gig of traffic coming from the packet is only 100 mbps, so the compression of Riverbed is very powerful.

Another is transport streamlining, which includes TCP optimization. The window size of the TCP protocol is achieved in order to transfer more data in the TCP section despite the endpoint. The endpoint transfer was very slow, but it doesn't matter because with Riverbed in the middle, it can handle more quantities of traffic.

For application streamlining, where the HTTP application previously had a lot of traffic, Riverbed recognizes HTTP protocols and it can optimize the process because it can create the HTTP server. Normally, the browser and web server agree and compress the traffic, but if Riverbed is in between, it strips the compression from the browser and Riverbed does its own compressions, which is more powerful, and hence, the application runs faster for the user.

Also, for HTTP, Riverbed does caching so it can store data from all the user traffic. It keeps track of the HTTP data locally. Traveling into the server isn't necessary. They can retrieve the information locally because there is a local Riverbed.

It's for a very specific use case. It's not for everything. Although the solution is very powerful, it doesn't apply to all enterprises.

There is only one feature that needs to be improved. In the case of a High Availability event, if we lose the primary Steelhead, all the connections need to be restarted. If we lose the primary Steelhead that handles the optimization, the secondary Steelhead cannot handle the same High Availability. Some applications will restart automatically, but for some other applications, like STP, the users need to start a new session. If we load a primary firewall, the secondary firewall usually handles all the active connections, but in Riverbed, this isn't the case. We lose all the active connections at the moment of failure.

I have been using Steelhead for five years. 

I would rate Steelhead a nine out of ten because the product is very stable; it never fails. It does compression and application optimization very well. 

Riverbed can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud as well. We can deploy it in Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. The solution is in the marketplace of every car provider and it also optimizes Office 365 traffic, since there's a partnership with Riverbed and Microsoft. We can deploy on-premise, we can deploy on IaaS or we can deploy on PaaS.

In the past, the internet links of the MPLS link were full capacity (one or two Mbps) and it was very expensive. Nowadays, the prices of the MPLS links are cheaper and the capacity is increased.

On-premises

The data compression through the WAN. It is like being on a LAN. It is even more effective when the technology uses an adaptive transfer scheme known as "warm transfer".

Critical data such as emails and Sharepoint files being able to move faster across the WAN via Riverbed Steelhead's compress/decompress mechanism.

Need to handle more traffic simultaneously.

2 years

No, everything is plug and play with minor configuration involved.

Not at all

Not at all

Customer Service: 5 out of 5Technical Support: 5 out of 5

I used Cisco WAAS technology before. The Riverbed Steelhead is much easier to configure and works faster on packet delivery.

Setup was very straightforward.

Less bandwidth usage

Please do some diligent research before purchasing the product. It is quite expensive but it is worth it in the long run.

First of all we are great fan of Riverbed WAN optimization feature which I would say is the most valuable for us as we have couple of low bandwidth scenarios. Apart from this we are using specific Office 365 optimization since we are using Exchange online. We also use EX functionality of the box where we host our VM servers.

Many of our offshore installation are on low bandwidth but this has really helped to optimize the network which basically means we are able to achieve faster data connection or link.

There are issues with the tech support and scalability.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no issues with the stability.

The device mostly comes with a standard configuration with no options to upgrade the hardware. This means that we need to go ahead with a new or high end model in case the infra changes happen.

Riverbed needs to really work on local support when it comes to technical knowledge transfer. They need to have teams who can give proper knowledge transfer to customers so that they can use the device in best ways

Riverbed is great product and base functionality of these devices which is WAN optimization is handled by them in best and intelligent way.

The WAN optimization feature is the most valuable.

It helps to save a lot of money in terms of buying bandwidth from a network provider due to the fact that it compresses more than 50% of the daily throughput.

The RIOS upgrade/download process must be overhauled to be a direct step process instead of the multiple stage procedure that currently take place.

There are lots of bugs detected in each release which give the assumption that it is not being thoroughly tested.

I've been supporting it for seven years.

We had no issues with the deployment but there are bugs in each release.

We have no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues with scaling it for our needs.

Technical support is very good in the WAN optimization department, needs a little more expertize in the steelcentral department.

I used Cisco WAAS, Juniper WX, and Ipanema. Riverbed are way ahead overall.

It was straightforward.

I work for a network provider so we are the people who do the implementation. I find that the implementation is very easy in this solution.

This product is far way ahead from its competitors.

The compression features are valuable, as at most sites it doubled our effective MPLS bandwidth capabilities for transfers.

The graphic designers used to ship burned DVDs with projects to our manufacturing in China, which took around three days one way. Once we had Riverbed at both sites, they were shipping the full projects in less than 12 hours.

When I was using them at a previous job, Riverbed Steelhead models were grouped into tiers.  Each tier had three models, low to high.  Through upgrade packs of RAM, CPU, HDDs, or a combination thereof, you could upgrade the lowest model in the tier to the middle or the high, or the middle model to the high model.  If you needed to go above the highest model in a tier do to things like needing more drive space, the box needing to deal with more bandwidth, or the box dealing with more concurrent connections, you had to get a whole new appliance from the next tier up and start the process over again. This means unless you had another site you could move the original appliance to, you basically had to rip and replace and lose your investment in the original box.

I didn't like the way platforms were scaled – if you started with a top end model of one of the tiers, if you needed to upgrade you had to rip and replace the box with a whole new one.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no issues with the stability.

We had issues upgrading when we wanted to scale.