We have many remote offices with minimal links. We were thinking of using accelerators instead of increasing the links and were investigating a few brands and a few devices. As part of this we decided to trial the Steelheads for one link.
One of our sites has a 1M link with about 25-30 users hammering the link for email, file sharing and web browsing. We have constantly received complaints and requests asking for something to be done with the link. The issue was not just the speed, but latency was a killer as well. We backup data (about 35GB) from the remote office over the 1M link to the HO which roughly takes about 2 days. Email replication was taking forever, file sharing was really slow and the users gave up on browsing the internet.
After we installed the steelheads, the backup takes about 12-14 hours, email replication is instantaneous and file sharing has never been better. All the users very really happy with the speed and no comaplaints whatsoever.
We use Lotus Notes and that was the biggest killer. We were very apprehensive about optimisation of Notes traffic, but Steelheads are doing a great job.
