The Steelhead 1050 from Riverbed

From NetworkComputing Magazine Vol 18 Issue 01 - January/February 2009

As businesses start to focus on their IT service delivery this year, it's imperative that they get the most out of their WAN links to remote offices, as these can represent a big expense if not utilised properly. There are plenty of WAN optimisation solutions on the market, but Riverbed moves up a gear as its latest Steelhead appliances deliver a range of new and unique features.

Along with a raft of standard features including compression, traffic shaping, QoS and application acceleration, Riverbed's latest RIOS 5.5 operating system delivers some major enhancements to its RSP (Riverbed Services Platform), allowing its appliances to offer a broader range of services. Using virtualisation technology from VMware, all Steelhead appliances can now run many applications and network services in virtual machines (VMs).

Riverbed supports both Windows Server 2003 and 2008 on its VMs and has focused clearly on deploying network infrastructure services to remote offices. These comprise primarily of DHCP, DNS, print services and Active Directory, but it also offers solutions for media streaming and application monitoring and analysis. This approach allows businesses to run local Windows services on their Steelhead appliances so replacing remote servers and reducing support costs. There's much more as RIOS uniquely supports acceleration of Lotus Notes and MAPI encrypted traffic, as well as Oracle Forms and MAPI 2007.

On review is the Steelhead 1050, which targets high end branch and remote office deployment along with head office deployment for SMBs. We installed this as our head office appliance and used a smaller Steelhead 550 on the remote side. Riverbed promotes its appliances as easy to deploy and we certainly had no problems. You start with a local CLI connection to the appliances and run through a simple wizard assisted routine to set up general network parameters. You then deploy your appliances and a discovery routine automatically links them together and sets up a connection between them.

For performance testing we called up the lab's Network Nightmare WAN simulator (www.networknightmare.com) and configured it for a 1Mbps WAN link with 40ms latency. On the LAN side we placed Windows Server 2003 R2 systems running IIS, FTP, file sharing and Kerio's MailServer. At our remote office we placed Windows XP and Vista clients and used a 4.8MB PowerPoint presentation to test a variety of scenarios.

Simple file/copy operations saw huge improvements with the presentation copied from client to server and back again in 46 and 49 seconds. These times were reduced to less than one second with optimisation activated. We noted on the first run that although the

data hadn't yet been cached, Riverbed's protocol optimisation played a big role, as the first client to server copy with the appliances active only took 25 seconds.

Remotely opening the file without optimisation took 63 seconds whilst saving a modification to the server took 48 seconds. With Riverbed on the case, these operations both took less than five seconds. For FTP transfers in each direction, the FileZilla utility reported times of 45 seconds and 49 seconds which tumbled to less than 1 second when the link was optimised. Mailing the file from the client to the server took 190 seconds, whilst receiving it at the client took 57 seconds. With optimisation enabled, both times dropped to less than 2 seconds.

There's no denying Riverbed's WAN optimisation appliances deliver excellent performance benefits that can deliver immediate cost and performance advantage. We found the appliances extremely easy to deploy and manage, and the new virtualisation features are an ideal solution for businesses that are looking to reduce operating costs by consolidating multiple services onto a single hardware platform. NC

Product: Steelhead 1050
Supplier: Riverbed Technology
Tel: 01344 354910
Web site:www.riverbed.com
Price: From $3,495.00 to $129,995.00