Riverbed is the ONLY non-cisco product which impressed me in the past 7 years. Being a CCIE, I have always been fanatic of Cisco products, but Riverbed proved me wrong..
I have sold riverbed solutions to tons of customers (ranging from banking, manufacturing, IT/ITES etc), and each customer has their success stories. It is a easy pre-sales pitch-in, and results were evident in 2-3 days post implementation. With other products, customer even analyzes for 1-2 years before getting useful info, but with riverbed it just took few days.
Riverbed has answers to all customer questions (rapid fire questions):
1) end to end acceleration - riverbed steelhead products
2) teleworker - SH mobile
3) high end datacenters with too many application servers - interceptor (with load balancing options)
4) Virtualization - Virtual SH, Virtual CMC
5) Branch solutions - PFS, RSP etc
6) Management - CMC
I have had a banking customer who just did POC for 2 days, and placed orders the following day... It was a solution involving Data replication for DR servers, and replication which used to take 8 hours completes within 2 hours with Riverbed. He also reduced the service provider bandwidth after few months, since Riverbed optimized the bandwidth and made him save cost there.
CIFS, Email (notes, exchange), FTP etc have been tremendous post implementation with another client (IT/ITES). Designing the solution with QOS policies needs to be taken care and deep understanding of how TCP works is required. Customers do appreciate the power of Steelhead with altering TCP options to make acceleration more effective.
I have heard of temper-pedic, posture-pedic beds, but I heard a customer saying Riverbed is a "Network-pedic" bed :)
Rajagopal Sivaramakrishnan
Sr. Network Engineer
Pangaia Partners LLC
raja_ccie@yahoo.com
