Microsoft Exchange performs poorly on WANs – so much so that large enterprises often deploy distributed Exchange servers to support their local users. Maintaining many Exchange servers is expensive and complex, and often puts critical confidential data at risk. While most IT managers would prefer a centralized Exchange architecture, they face severe performance issues for their remote users.

By deploying Steelhead appliances, users in remote offices can access Exchange servers in a centralized and distant data center with roughly the same responsiveness as a local mail server. Riverbed can even help you avoid the early morning WAN congestion caused by the first log in of remote users. By pre-populating Steelhead appliances with users' email and attachments, there is virtually no incremental traffic when they log in first thing in the morning.

In addition to better performance, Riverbed’s SDR feature removes all redundancy from WAN traffic – including common email challenges like “reply to all” (which can plague WAN links by generating many copies of an email) and email with large attachments in which multiple copies of the file would otherwise be sent across the WAN, bringing other applications to a halt.

_{Steelhead applicances can accelerate Exchange traffic by up to 54x}

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Exchange 2007 Acceleration

With the latest release of the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS 5.0), Riverbed expands its support for Microsoft Exchange environments, and becomes the first WDS vendor to deliver a protocol optimization specifically for MAPI 2K7. RiOS 5.0 recognizes Exchange 2007 traffic in native mode and applies specific enhancements to significantly improve performance.

Exchange 2003 Acceleration

Riverbed was also the first WDS vendor to provide an application layer protocol optimization for Exchange 2003, which has been available since the RiOS 1.2 release. To date, Riverbed is still the only vendor to accelerate Exchange 2003 traffic at layer 7. Thousands of Riverbed customers have leveraged this optimization to consolidate their Microsoft Exchange servers and accelerated access to email.

Outlook 2003 Cache Mode

For more information on the benefits of using Riverbed with Outlook 2003 Cache Mode, click here.