News, Announcements, and Events

[cdhesc]

During evaluation of our WAN we were faced with upgrading the WAN speeds or to utilize compression.
We evaluated the various vendors and then selected Riverbed. Currently we have 45 Steelhead appliances
installed using models ranging from the 200 up to the Steelhead 5520.
We also purchased the Central Management Console as this greatly relieves the pain of administration and
configuring new devices.

Our sites are seeing between a 2.5 x to 13.5 x improvement in bandwidth, the sites that used to complain
on a daily basis are no longer heard from.

For monitoring and trouble shooting purposes we have purchased Netflow Analyzer and all Steelhead appliances
are configured to send stats back to our system and have deployed MRTG to monitor data rates as well as the
number of optimized vs pass-through connections.

All in all I would say that we are very happy with the Riverbed product, it has exceeded my expectations.

[bspark]

Our company, a medium-sized civil engineering firm was originally connected via a dedicated T-1 to two smaller offices. Each office had its own Novell 4.11 file server which served us well for many years. However, with rapid expansion in the past couple of years (we opened 3 more satellite offices), and with increasing file sharing occurring between offices, we needed a WAN solution. We researched and selected Riverbed Steelhead's WAN optimisers since they offered the best product for our needs at that time.

We wanted to consolidate all of our data and backups (that weren't always getting done in our remote offices). Our users have always been used to having their own file server, so performance over the WAN had to measure up.

We purchased 6 Steelheads (a larger Steelhead for our corporate headquarters, and smaller Steelheads for remote offices). So far, we've installed a Steelhead in our main office as a pilot test, plus a Model 100 in one of our smaller remote offices (5-6 users). Aside from some AutoCAD issues early on, we have been very happy with the result. We're seeing optimized traffic ranging between 70-90%.

One of our users uses GIS fairly extensively (large data transfers), and has been pretty happy with the performance. We have a VOIP (Nortel) system in our remote offices and have had zero problems.

Our next step is to start consolidating two of our larger offices (25 employees, and 14 employees, respectively) and install Steelhead applicances in those offices to see if the performance gains from our smaller office equates with what we can expect in our larger offices.

All in all, things look very promising.

Bruce Park

[alans]

The Banks Group win "Distributed Enterprise" Award in the Civil Engineering category at the Bentley International user Conference in Los Angeles for their use of SharePoint and Riverbed Technology

Bentley Award Winners - See Civil Engineering

In September last year we implemented Riverbed Steelhead appliances at all of our 6 offices in the UK. As well as allowing us to consolidate from 5 to 1 exchange servers we rolled out a VoIP Avaya telephone system, dropped our ISDN lines and started to video conference between the sites (we use a mixture of Sony and Polycom video units). We have 2MB MPLS links between all offices. To help this we have implemented the QoS feature on the Steelheads to give priority to all traffic coming from the Video Conferencing units and give them gaurenteed bandwidth. This has allowed us to create site to site VC links at 512K and multi-point links at 256K.

We also rolled out a SharePoint 2003 solution containing financial, office, and CAD drawings - number of documents now exceeds 60,000. We have created Project Portals fo all our main projects from which all users can access any information on the Project. This has only been made possible by the introduction of Riverbed Steelhead appliances which have allowed us to access all files at LAN like speeds - particulalry CAD files which were upto 1GB in size.

The management are aware that none of this would have been possible without the Riverbed appliances which we chose after evaluating many systems including the following: Packeteer, BlueCoat, and Expand.

Alan Sherwen
Group ICT Manager
The Banks Group

[herreraf]

Bob,

This is a great idea and a very successful initiative. I'm always amazed by the stories told by Steelhead users. Please, keep them coming!

[fendesj]

We have installed Steelheads at 50 WAN sites. These are mostly 1020's with six being 2020's. Links are 1Mbs to 1.5Mbs with six sites being 4Mbs to 10Mbs. The WAN connections come into one of three data center sites. Each of these three data center sites has 2 Steelhead 3520's in failover mode with data store syncing. We use a CMC-8000 to manage these. The WAN sites run typical MS Office stuff (lots of CIFS), Notes, Customer Service systems, meter reading, various HTTP apps, Work Management, GIS, ELearning, etc. We average around 75% data reduction overall which is great. We also run Cisco VoIP at our WAN sites with centralized Call Managers so we have QoS implemented in our routers.

Our motivation for doing this was to speed up access to our centralized file servers and applications, and to provide an infrastucture that would run new applications we were deploying. The major new applications are a new Customer Service system and ELearning. The ELearning system is used for training and uses lots of prerecorded training videos. Without the Steelheads we could only support a few concurrent sessions. With them we can support many more.

Each of these 50 sites had a Windows file server installed. This server supported software distribution (via SMS) and hosted local print queues. The 50 servers were due to be replaced so we installed Steelheads instead which helped pay for the project. We had to accommodate the software distribution and printing functions being done by the local server however so we did a pilot in two offices to develop and test a strategy. For software distribution we used the RiverBed Copy Utility (RCU) to prepopulate the Steelheads with our application install directory and our SMS install package directory. The users install applications and SMS packages from a central server over the WAN but get LAN-like performance because the data store is warm. Once V3 came out we switched from RCU to the prepopulation feature built-in to V3. For printing we simply started using print queues on central servers at the data center. This worked better than expected as this data optimizes very well and we typically get data reductions on the print traffic of over 90%.

[kftwp]

We have been faced with slow CIFS performance over our WAN for years. Users would constantly complain and we were running out of options. We evaluated other options, but none of them were painless, and they all came with various headaches. Luckily in late 2005 we were introduced to Riverbed and decided to do an evaluation. Well, that was the shortest evaluation we have ever done. It was put into place on a Tuesday evening, and by Wednesday morning, a PO was cut and the units were purchased. IT started getting thank you emails from end users for finally solving their problem . I am still amazed.

We currently have 5 Steelheads deployed in various offices consisting of either 5010s or 2020s. Most of the corporate data resides at our headquarters in San Francisco, and we have a huge number of people of who work remotely or in our other offices. We have about 15TB of data that leaves our SF office destined to another office each month. This data consists of various protocols including CIFS, HTTP (internal applications), MAPI, SQL, Oracle, 3PAR storage replication, Data Domain replication, EMC Centera replication, etc. I am amazed at the optimization numbers we are seeing. CIFS is being optimized 60%, Data Domain 33%, HTTP 86%, SQL and Oracle over 85%, 3Par and EMC replication 84%. I could go on and on.

Our LAN/WAN hardware is all Cisco. We have mix of Nortel and Cisco VoIP solutions as well and QoS, and we have not had any issues at all.

Now, whenever we setup a new office, we automatically purchase a new Steelhead. The most recent addition has been a 2020 for a fast growing office in Mumbai, India. They will be spoiled!

[Ray]

Wright-Pierce is an engineering company with five offices throughout New England. We deployed Steelhead (SH) appliances late in 2003 as a beta test case, as part of a company-wide effort to improve interoffice workflows and communications. Prior to SH, we had optimized procedures set up for the FTP download and upload (and signout) of AutoCAD drawings which was working. But like many things, if the users don't always follow the procedures, the system breaks down, and expensive mistakes start to occur. These mistakes involved revision control issues with work product being stored and worked on in multiple locations on the network. What we were being told by Riverbed, of course, is that their new technology would make it possible for the CAD users to work in real time over the WAN links. I didn't think that was possible, but I didn't have much to loose in trying this technology out. The instant gratification my CAD users had once we installed the Steelheads was remarkable. They stopped having to do the FTP downloads and uploads. They could now simply all work off the same central network share as everyone else in the home office. It was a great success. Since then, we have centralized ALL our data, and all five offices work off the servers located in the home office. The increased productivity and interoffice workflow has enabled our company to succeed in its growth and success.

Once or twice a month, IT would get calls from a branch office complaining that "the network was down". It did not take us long to realize that the WAN link was saturated by "something"... someone was pulling down some huge aerial photogrametry, or other huge files (50mb or 100 mb each). Here again, we had procedures set up to prevent this kind of thing. But even in the most disciplined of workplaces, procedural solutions will fail from time to time. The WAN monitoring tools I had in place would tell me that the offending IP address in the branch office, creating all the traffic, was (big surprise) the SH's address. The WAN monitoring tool (Solarwinds.net) could not tell me who the real user was on the other side of that SH device. When talking with Riverbed early on about this problem they said it would be addressed in RiOS 3.0 with a feature called NetFlow exporting. NetFlow is a protocol developed by Cisco to export statistics and traffic flow information, and there are many different NetFlow collector applications to pick from on the market. When RiOS 3.0 came out I purchased ManageEngine (http://manageengine.adventnet.com/), then told the SH devices the IP address of the machine which ManageEngine was installed on. WOW, I now had a remarkable amount of information at my disposal, which I never had before about the traffic on my network. It not only helped me identify the sources of traffic problems when they occured, but it also helped my identify other sources of rogue traffic that I would not have otherwise known about.

In a kind of 3rd generation of our configuration of SH technology, Wright-Pierce began utilizing the improved QoS functionality last year when RiOS 4.0 was out in beta. What this does, of course, is empower me to thottle down the traffic from the specific server where all the aerial photogrametry is stored. This means that the users can hit on that server all they want now (improved procedures), and there is no way they'll saturate the WAN link over which they and all their co-workers work. This whole advancement in Riverbed technology, meeting our needs has been a great ride. The QoS feature makes me able to live up to its namesake. "With Steelheads the IT Group is truly able to deliver better quality of service."
- Ray
FMI on my SH QoS configuration which integrates nicely with my Cisco QoS configuration, see these posts: http://www.wdsforum.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=44

[hiker_42]

We currently have 18 Steelheads deployed consisting of a mix 520's, 1020's, 2020's, and 5010's. The amount of data reduction across the board has been
astounding. Over the last month we are seeing total data reductions across the WAN at around 85% and a capacity increase of 6X. Our LAN/WAN hardware is
all Cisco. We have a mix of Cisco and Avaya VOIP solutions as well as QOS implementations. Neither of these has been adversely affected by any of the Riverbeds.

We had tested the Parabit product prior to purchase and found the Riverbed products vastly superior both in performance and administration.

Overall we are very satisfied with our Steelheads and the results have easily justified the costs of the products.

[SThandi]

We currently have a variety of Steelhead appliances (100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000, 3000 series) running in 18 locations worldwide, with 6 more going online in the next few months. As part of our bake off, we looked at various competitors (Cisco, Tacit, etc), but none offered the same performance, simplicity, value, and feature set at that time.

We have standardized on Cisco for our LAN and WAN hardware, Polycom for video conferencing, and Nortel for Telephony. Our WAN is a fully meshed environment with a combination of private MPLS and Public Internet VPN to each office. The introduction of the Steelheads had virtually no impact on the performance of our telephony and video conferencing solutions. There was however a side benefit of using the appliances and this is around the troubleshooting process. The reporting feature within each appliance allows us to view network traffic right down to the protocol level and allows us to have greater visibiilty into our network.

The most immediate benefit and our rational for deploying Steelheads to our regional offices was due to the improved performance of global collaboration. This includes basic file sharing as well as sharepoint document libraries and email.

Our experience with Riverbed has been very positive, the deployment easy, and the overall value proposition significant.

Satvir

[groshong]

We were looking for ways to improve performance in our offices in London and Shangai and also reduce cost for our smaller US offices while providing same or better performance. We brought in both Riverbed and Juniper for a bake-off between one of our New York sites that has Research analysts and Investment Bankers and our Corporate HQ. Event though we are a heavy Juniper shop and use many of there other product lines, there was no doubt after the 'real-world' testing that we would deploy Riverbed.

The Riverbed performance nearly doubled the Juniper box and that was the 3.0 #27 code. The Riverbeds have delivered on everything that the sales team and engineers have promised. We are now looking to expand our deployment from international offices and dsl sites to include all offices. We also run VOIP (IP HOOT) for the traders in several remote sites and have no problems.

The reduction is phenomenal. We wish we would have deployed these long-ago. It eliminates the need for remote file servers even with end-users that share large pitch books with others across the globe. The interfaces are simple to use and management of devices are truly plug and play. Great Product!