Steelhead and Juniper Contrail SD-WAN are both SD-WAN solutions. Juniper Contrail SD-WAN seems to have the upper hand due to its robust features.
Features:Users highlight Steelhead's WAN optimization, ease of use, and strong pricing. Juniper Contrail SD-WAN stands out with advanced routing capabilities, cloud integration, and a comprehensive feature set.
Room for Improvement:Users suggest Steelhead could improve reporting capabilities, third-party tool integration, and configuration complexity. Juniper Contrail SD-WAN users seek enhancements in configuration simplicity, a more intuitive dashboard, and streamlined processes.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:Steelhead is praised for straightforward deployment and excellent customer service. Juniper Contrail SD-WAN's deployment can be complex, but users commend its customer support. Steelhead is easier to deploy.
Pricing and ROI:Steelhead is noted for competitive pricing and satisfactory ROI. Juniper Contrail SD-WAN, despite higher costs, is seen as delivering good ROI due to its extensive capabilities and performance.
Without Steelhead, we would have spent much more on bandwidth costs.
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.
It allows us to maximize use from our MPLS providers by handling traffic efficiently across phased deployments.
It's quite stable and provides all necessary alerts if something is wrong.
Steelhead helps significantly with large data transfers.
It could still be useful in places with satellite communications, such as the south of Chile, or in the mining industry.
It would help if Riverbed could prevent such drastic impacts during updates.
Buying the hardware initially is costly, but yearly maintenance and licenses are not as expensive.
Steelhead is considered an expensive solution in our country.
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.
Contrail SD-WAN delivers a simple, automated multicloud SD-WAN. It enables you to create an evolvable architecture to simplify growth, from secure routers to SD-WAN, SD-Branch, and beyond. It automates the WAN edge across Juniper virtual cloud endpoints and on-premises next-generation firewall or universal CPE platforms. And it provisions and enforces multilevel security policy at scale, across multiple clouds and enterprise sites with diverse topologies.
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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