Steelhead appliances are designed to accelerate the applications your organization cares the most about, but do it in a way that makes it very simple to integrate into your network. The appliances are architected to be transparent to your existing network infrastructure, yet give you the flexibility to configure them in a number of different ways to fit your needs.
Truly Transparent Deployment
Steelhead appliances can be deployed with no changes to your servers, routers, applications, or user desktops. Steelhead appliances can accelerate data and files without interfering with your basic network infrastructure.
Steelhead appliances also support auto-discovery to simplify the task of deploying and expanding network deployments. Auto-discovery allows any Steelhead appliance to automatically find its peers in a network and start communicating with them. Steelhead appliances require no tedious tunnel configurations, eliminating tremendous amounts of IT management.
Works with any size WAN Connection
There is no upper or lower requirement to any particular WAN connection when using a Steelhead appliance. As long as there is a persistent WAN connection available, a Steelhead appliance can accelerate applications across that connection. Steelhead appliances come in a range of sizes to meet the needs of your locations.
Simple Qualification for Regulated Environments
Steelhead appliances pass client requests to the origin server. This means that there is no significant impact to the operation or security of your current application infrastructure. In highly regulated environments, this approach enables IT managers to quickly and easily qualify Steelhead appliances for use in their network environments.
Steelhead appliances also do not store complete files on disk. Data Streamlining technologies segment data and store it in an application-independent manner, essentially rendering it incomprehensible to the casual observer. Thus, these appliances avoid introducing yet another device that requires strict auditing and control by IT management.
Finally, Steelhead appliances can significantly accelerate the process of backup and replication. By doing so, organizations can perform more frequent backups across the WAN, accelerate data center replication, and even eliminate tape backup in remote offices. These accelerated backup processes can help an organization exceed minimally acceptable practices mandated by the federal government, third party oversight, or even internal oversight committees.
Tested with MPLS Networks
MPLS is quickly gaining acceptance as an important upgrade to enterprise networks. User benefits include lower cost in most cases, greater control over networks, and more detailed Quality-of-Services. MPLS also provides fully-meshed, any-to-any connectivity among offices and more flexibility in bandwidth provisioning.
Steelhead appliances have been successfully deployed across MPLS networks. In fact, Steelhead appliances require no special configuration to work across an MPLS-enabled network, and possess features that make them more compatible to MPLS networks than other approaches to application acceleration.
Steelhead appliances use auto-discovery to automatically find and communicate with all Steelhead peers on a network. Because of this capability, IT managers are not required to perform tedious tunnel configurations among appliances. If an enterprise needed to configure tunnels for a fully meshed network with 2,000 locations, they would be required to configure a minimum of 3,998,000 (2000 times 1999) tunnels. If the organization had many subnets per location, this number could increase by an order of magnitude. And if an organization wanted to add an additional location, a minimum of 2000 more tunnels would need to be configured. By enabling auto-discovery, Steelhead appliances render tedious tunnel configuration unnecessary.
Works over Satellite
Similar to MPLS, using Steelhead appliances with satellite requires no special configuration. In fact, given that satellite connections tend to have very high latency, enterprises may see significantly faster application performance. Steelhead appliances are currently accelerating applications via satellite to land locations with limited forms of alternative connectivity, offshore oil platforms, cargo ships, and even submarines.
