STEELHEAD INTERCEPTOR – WOC LOAD BALANCER
Enterprise scalability, high availability and exclusive load-balancer intelligence for SteelHead
Amplify the power of SteelHead Interceptor by clustering multiple solutions together
When you want more throughput or connections than just one SteelHead can provide – or if you want a high-availability deployment option – SteelHead Interceptor helps manage and scale your network-wide throughput.
What is a Load Balancer?
SteelHead Interceptor enables customers to scale optimization solutions to support hundreds of thousands of end users across an enterprise, as well as very high bandwidth connections into the data center. SteelHead Interceptor clusters groups of SteelHeads to work together seamlessly and provides:
- Real-time dynamic load balancing of your SteelHeads
- Enhanced optimization for even greater throughput and bandwidth reduction
- The ability to add, modify, or remove SteelHeads in real time, with no disruption to operations
- Clustering of up to 20 SteelHeads to manage up to one million concurrent connections
How It Works
With SteelHead Interceptor, you can intelligently integrate all your SteelHead solutions while directing activity and network load with superior management and administration capabilities.
Whether you want more throughput or connections than just one SteelHead can provide – or if you desire a higher availability option – SteelHead Interceptor helps manage and scale SteelHead solutions.
TCP connection forwarding
- Ensures continuity between SteelHead appliances in large environments with asymmetrically-routed networks
- Supports one to four Interceptors, and up to 20 SteelHead solutions
Multiple configuration options
- Offers multiple configuration options − in series, in parallel and in quad
- Delivers multiple in-path clustering and flexible network failure options
Detailed visibility
- Supports up to 10 rules, tracing up to 1,000 connections for troubleshooting
- Works with the SteelHead IP Address and Port Transparency feature for more visibility
Speed with finely tuned control
- Supports 1 million optimized connections
- Exclusively provides hardware assist pass through
- Delivers fine grain control of what traffic gets optimized and how, with configurable load balancing rules
- Allows real time-cluster management without disruption to services
The Benefits of Steelhead Interceptor
SteelHead Interceptor makes it easy to extend the benefits of SteelHead solutions across a large enterprise, while centralizing management efforts and ensuring optimization services across the enterprise.
Optimization scalability and high-availability
- Increases scalability to accelerate more users and applications in high bandwidth environments
- Continues high availability operations by diverting to fully functional SteelHeads with a SteelHead or network failure
- Offers fair peering load-balancing intelligence that steers traffic to the optimal SteelHead
- Exclusively delivers the only load-balancing solution capable of assessing SteelHead appliances to most efficiently balance traffic
Simplified management for large enterprises
- Integrates with Riverbed SteelCentral Controller for centralized management and upgrades
- Automatically load-balances th entire SteelHead cluster
- Eliminates transmission of redundant data to offer the most bandwidth reduction
Visibility, optimization and control
- Increases application and data transfer performance up to 100x
- Delivers improved visibility with end user monitoring for all optimized traffic on premise and web and SaaS applications
What Can You Save? What Can You Gain?
IDC conducted detailed interviews with nine organizations to understand the impact of optimizing the delivery of business applications with Riverbed SteelHead.
IDC calculates that organizations will realize benefits worth an average of $27,014 per 100 users ($7.23 million per organization) per year over three years, which translates to a projected three-year return on investment (ROI) of 497%.
Infographic: SteelHead, the ROI Winner
Customer Stories for SteelHead Interceptor


Achieved dramatic improvements in performance
Willis Group Holdings Limited (www.willis.com) is a leading global insurance broker, delivering professional insurance, reinsurance, risk management, financial and human resource consulting, and actuarial services to institutions around the world.
The Cisco solution met one of six criteria, but Riverbed gave us five of the six we wanted, and that breadth of capability was the key differentiator.Eoghan Doyle, Director of infrastructure and Operations, Willis Group Holdings


IT migration to cloud-based applications and Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Schneider Electric is a global specialist in energy management. The 176-year-old French firm got its start in the steel industry, then expanded into power and control in the last half of the twentieth century.
The views I created using Riverbed open APIs ease capacity planning of Internet bandwidth / Internet peering, help negotiate costs with upstream transit providers by easily qualifying the most important destinations, and elaborate a peering (public / private) policy to collect the traffic from Internet exchange points.Lionel Marie, Network Architect, Schneider Electric


VTB Bank has increased the performance of applications and employees with the help of Riverbed Steelhead
VTB Bank is a Russian commercial bank with state participation, a key element under VTB Group. It is the second largest bank in Russia in terms of assets and the first in terms of share capital size. The main activities of the bank include working with corporate clients and financial institutions, government agencies and enterprises.
The most important result for us is business application acceleration. It increases employee productivity, speed and convenience of working with centralised applicationsDmitry Nazipov, Head of Information Technology Department — Senior Vice President, VTB Bank
Technical Specifications
| Datacenter | |
Model | INT9600 | INT9350 |
Power [Watts] (Typical) | 227 | 320 |
BTU | 774 | 1091 |
System Dimensions (LxWxH)(iii) | 27.87 X 17.24 X 3.45 in 707.8 X 438 X 87.6 mm | 25.72x17.0x5.2 in 653.4x431.6x131.9 mm |
Max Weight (without packaging) | 40 Lbs/ 18.14 Kg | 51Lbs/ 23.2Kg |
Download: SteelHead Family Brochure
Download the full SteelHead Family Spec Sheet
Featured Resources
Chalk Talk
SteelHead Chalk Talk: Visibility, Optimization and Control across the Hybrid WAN

SteelHead Services
Lifecycle consulting services to help you fast-track your deployments, ensure ongoing success, and optimize the business value of your SteelHead investments.
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