Steelhead Family Overview

The Riverbed^® WAN optimization solution can change the way businesses work by improving and accelerating application performance across the WAN while significantly reducing the amount of traffic on the network. Using WAN optimization, IT can provide LAN-like access to data and applications throughout the enterprise — anytime, anywhere. It’s the only solution to span mobile workers, branch offices, data centers, and clouds, allowing a distributed workforce to collaborate in real-time. And it does all this while streamlining operations, improving visibility, and reducing the costs of IT infrastructure

• Improve the performance of many of the most commonly used applications across the network, typically by 5-50 times and, in some cases, by up to 100 times.
• Ensure fast, reliable access to data and applications for employees around the globe. Achieve LAN-like performance for mobile employees, no matter where they are.
• Reduce the use of WAN bandwidth by 65-95 percent, and relieve network congestion.
• Cut server costs and routine IT maintenance.Consolidate servers into data centers more effectively and enable virtualization, without impacting performance.
• Push out costly network upgrades by two years or more.

Steelhead xx50s: The Riverbed^® Steelhead^® products accelerate application performance and data transfer over the wide area network (WAN), overcoming bandwidth and geographical limitations to improve productivity and enable global collaboration. With Riverbed, file transfers that once took hours or minutes, now take minutes or seconds.

Steelhead CX Appliance: The Riverbed^® Steelhead^® CX series features dedicated appliances designed to provide the highest performing and most scalable WAN optimization solutions for any sized environment.  Purpose built and singularly focused on delivering the speed, scale, and simplicity that are hallmarks of the Riverbed product family, the Steelhead CX series is powered by the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) that thousands of organizations rely upon to deliver LAN-like performance across the wide area network (WAN).

Steelhead EX Appliance: The Riverbed Steelhead EX series combines WAN optimization and virtualization to enable organizations to meet the needs of the active branch office with an enterprise-class branch office box. Built on VMware, the Steelhead EX series offers the performance of the award winning RiOS and flexibility of the Riverbed Virtual Services Platform (VSP) for greater consolidation than ever before.

Steelhead EX + Granite: Steelhead EX + Granite™, the virtual edge of the data center,  sets a new architectural standard for the modern, active branch office by enabling greater consolidation while ensuring an accelerated and reliable end-user experience.  Featuring a powerful combination of WAN optimization, a virtual services platform, and innovative block-storage optimization, Steelhead EX + Granite consolidates applications and services onto a single appliance that accesses and writes to centrally managed data over the WAN as if it were local in the branch.

Steelhead Mobile: Steelhead^® Mobile optimizes application performance across a full range of applications  for mobile workers. With Steelhead Mobile client software, companies of any size can give mobile workers LAN-like access to corporate files and applications no matter where they are in the world. Steelhead Mobile overcomes the challenges that plague mobile workers, including variable locations, inconsistent links, and high-latency environments, and it does so seamlessly and transparently. This results in higher productivity and more efficient operations, access, and performance anywhere.

Virtual Steelhead: Virtual Steelhead^® extends the reach of WAN optimization to virtual environments. With Riverbed Virtual Steelhead appliances, WAN optimization now extends to deployments where physical hardware may not be convenient. For example, certain military deployments typically use ruggedized, custom hardware.  Additionally,  mobile news vans and construction trailers have  severe space limitations.  Virtual Steelhead works great in these scenarios helping to extend the reach of WAN optimization.

Cloud Steelhead: Cloud Steelhead^® extends Riverbed  WAN optimization to a solution that is purpose-built for public cloud computing environments.  Public, private, and hybrid cloud environments all face the performance limitations inherent in today’s applications and networks. In order for enterprises to maximize the flexibility and cost savings of the public cloud they must overcome the same latency and bandwidth constraints that challenge distributed IT infrastructure environments. Cloud Steelhead offers a number of features to help ensure a smooth transition and user experience.

Central Management Console: Centralized configuration, monitoring and control.  The Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC) simplifies the process of deploying and managing Steelhead products that are distributed across a WAN. With this turnkey solution, businesses can easily configure, monitor, report on, and upgrade groups of Steelhead appliances from Riverbed and Virtual Steelhead — all through one web-based interface.

Interceptor: Interceptor^® appliance provides high scalability and availability for sites with multiple Steelhead appliances. The Interceptor appliance extends the scaling and high-availability capabilities of Steelhead appliances to meet the requirements of the largest and most complex enterprise networks and data center environments. The Interceptor appliance allows these organizations to scale their WAN optimization solutions to support hundreds of thousands of end users, and scale up to optimize very-high-bandwidth network connections in the data center.

Services Platforms(RSP/VSP): The Steelhead EX Series features the Riverbed Virtual Services Platform (VSP), a VMware based architecture that can run virtualized instances of an organization’s own services or take advantage of applications designed for VSP by a Riverbed Technology Alliance (RTA) partner.  The resource rich appliances offer dedicated resources to ensure maximum performance for both WAN optimization and virtual services.  Tightly integrated and intelligently designed, the Riverbed Steelhead EX series allows fine-grained configuration of data rules allowing virtualized services to run in or out of path, all without any impact on core WAN optimization performance.  The result is a true enterprise class branch office box capable of virtualizing previously un-consolidatable branch office services.

• Accelerate application performance, typically by 5-50 times and, in some cases, by up to 100 times. Business will get more out of the applications they rely on every day, including file sharing, email, backup, SSL, document management systems, IT tools, SharePoint, SAP, and ERP and CRM solutions.
• Consolidate islands of underutilized storage from branch offices.  Allow end-users and applications to access and write to centrally managed storage over the WAN as if it were local.
• Optimize WAN bandwidth and avoid costly upgrades
• Reduce network traffic, relieve network congestion, and lower costs
• Cut bandwidth utilization, typically by 60-95 percent, using data deduplication across all TCP and UDP-based applications. Data is analyzed at the byte level, ensuring that the maximum amount of redundant data is eliminated before it crosses the network.
• Utilize QoS capabilities to prioritize essential content and applications.  Free up bandwidth for other applications, such as voice or video, so they can perform better.

• Businesses can use the infrastructure they already have more efficiently, and cut the use of bandwidth, routers, and switches
• Deploy in a matter of minutes by following a virtually plug-and-play process

Consolidation and Virtualization — Centralize IT infrastructure to lower costs, simplify management, improve security, and ease regulatory compliance, without clogging networks, sacrificing performance, or frustrating users. 

Collaboration — Allow workers across the globe to share applications, documents, email, design files, and software as if they were all operating from the same location.

Cloud Acceleration — Go beyond just accelerating applications hosted in corporate data centers to accelerate applications running in public, private and hybrid clouds  as well.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery — Cut RPO by 90 percent and radically reduce RTO by optimizing backup across the current WAN and VPN. Recover data on virtual machines up to 50 times faster.

Visibility — Proactively optimize and control the performance of applications, servers, and the network, all from a single web interface.

Agility — Respond to changing business needs quickly, without ballooning budgets. Make IT infrastructure much more nimble.

There are several primary deployment scenarios that can be achieved with the Steelhead product family.  Each has its advantages.A Riverbed sales person can help to determine what’s most appropriate for an organization’s needs.

Scenario 1: Typical Steelhead product deployment, data center and branch.

Scenario 2: Data center to data center WAN optimization.

Scenario 3:Accelerating to the cloud with Cloud Steelhead.

Scenario 4: Complete Steelhead product deployment spanning mobile workers, branch offices, and hybrid clouds.

Scenario 5: Steelhead EX + Granite Deployment.