I have been able throughout my career to evaluate three acceleration devices. The Expand Accelerator, The Citrix WanScaler, and recently, the Riverbed acceleration appliance. By order of merit, the configuration of the Expand Accelerator was incredibly man-power intensive, the Citrix WanScaler...while easier to configure, did not demonstrate outstanding acceleration, while I recently was asked to evaluate Riverbed for my company. After installation, CIFS shares and compression statistics demonstrated a 10x perceived improvement over 3 days. SQL data reduction was off the charts. What was crazy, however, was printing improvements! Users at our branch offices perform a lot of printing that requires that data to come back to the campus. My lord! Improvments demonstrated went from 3 minutes to wait for a print job to less than 20 seconds. At site date reduction dropped by almost 3X due to compression. Why send it across the WAN if you don't have to? Made sense to me!!!
The most incredible thing, as opposed to previous implementations at other locations, was how easily it functioned and how it did not break other traffic types. Honestly, I did not have that same experience with other products. Connections would have to be reset, appliances shut down and troubleshot, reboots, complaints. Oh my lord...it was a nightmare. Finally, I abandoned the idea of acceleration.
I am a Cisco networking guy. However, it was due to this evaluation that I realize that Cisco is not the best at everything. Riverbed was incredibly impressive for our evaluation and I honestly urge you to consider it during your evaluation process. Quite frankly...in the last few years...it was the easiest integration I have EVER done.
Best of luck in your endeavors. We engineer types...from time to time...need it. You want to accelerate and compression --> think Riverbed man!
By the way...I am not on these guy's payroll. :)
