

Steelhead and Huawei Enterprise Routers are prominent products in the networking market. Based on features and overall performance, Huawei Enterprise Routers have the upper hand, while Steelhead is noted for its deployment and customer service.
Features: Steelhead users value its WAN optimization, bandwidth efficiency, and reliability. Huawei Enterprise Routers are praised for robust security, extensive connectivity options, and high scalability.
Room for Improvement: Steelhead needs enhancements in integration capabilities, flexibility, and more detailed reporting. Huawei Enterprise Routers require improvements in documentation, technical support, and user interface.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Steelhead is recognized for straightforward deployment and responsive customer service. Huawei offers detailed configuration options and is seen as more complex to deploy with mixed reviews on customer service.
Pricing and ROI: Steelhead generally has lower initial setup costs and a decent ROI. Huawei Enterprise Routers have higher setup costs but users find the investment justified by advanced features and long-term value.
Without Steelhead, we would have spent much more on bandwidth costs.
I have no issues with technical support from Riverbed.
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.
Riverbed's customer service and technical support would be rated an eight.
If a customer has 1 GB traffic, they will only be able to utilize 600 MB of traffic with Steelhead.
It allows us to maximize use from our MPLS providers by handling traffic efficiently across phased deployments.
If the power is unplugged from Riverbed, it goes into fail-to-wire mode.
It's quite stable and provides all necessary alerts if something is wrong.
Steelhead helps significantly with large data transfers.
Steelhead is very expensive, and the vendor should work on handling Oracle type of traffic better.
It would help if Riverbed could prevent such drastic impacts during updates.
It could still be useful in places with satellite communications, such as the south of Chile, or in the mining industry.
Buying the hardware initially is costly, but yearly maintenance and licenses are not as expensive.
Steelhead is considered an expensive solution in our country.
Steelhead provides real-time optimization with graphs and tables on real-time optimization, informing us packet by packet including port, source IP, destination IP, and destination port number.
Functions like acting as an NTP server, DNS, DHCP, and auto-optimization mode enhance efficiency.
Steelhead's most valuable feature is its ability to hash and send only the important parts of the information, avoiding the resending of data.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Steelhead | 1.6% |
| Huawei Enterprise Routers | 2.3% |
| Other | 96.1% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 13 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 8 |
| Large Enterprise | 5 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 7 |
| Large Enterprise | 14 |
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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