Steelhead Reviews

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.