Steelhead Reviews

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.

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.

Management purchased the product initially for its ability to reduce WAN traffic, especially to overseas partners. However, lately it has also become a valuable traffic shaping tool via it's ability to set QoS marking on traffic we specify.

It has allowed us to purchase lower bandwidth from our WAN vendors than we normally would have without the Steelhead units.

Setting up QoS marking is not all that intuitive. I would like to see all settings needed to set QoS up on one page rather than three or four.

We've used it for approximately five years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

Some types of data flows between servers don't always lend themselves to being optimized by the Steelhead unit. These data flows must have bypass rules set up in order to properly pass traffic.

We have had no issues with the scalability.

Riverbed has excellent technical support. Even on non-critical cases I have always gotten a support engineer. Most support staff are very understandable.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Give the unit an IP address for management, an IP address for your WAN segment and place it inline between your local network and your WAN. Steelhead will automatically find peers and set up peering.

We implemented it via in-house team. My advice is to try setup yourself and if you need assistance, call the support line. They will get you up and running.

I am not involved in the purchasing or licensing.

This was our first WAN optimization solution. This product was selected by upper management. I did not have a role in the selection process.

Although I'm sure this is obvious to most it may not be to some when you make your initial purchase you need to buy at least two. The SteelCentral Controller is not strictly needed as all the units can be managed individually, but the more units you deploy, it becomes more difficult to maintain a standard configuration across devices. This is where the SCC comes in very handy.

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

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.