Steelhead Appliance

[joshtseng · Accepted solution]

We have a large number of customers who have removed their Packetshapers.  We also have many customers who now use their Packetshapers only for traffic monitoring, and perform both WAN optimization and QoS using their Steelheads.

As far as QoS is concerned, the only major feature missing from the Steelhead's QoS enforcement capabilities is Deep Packet Inspection (DPI).  If your client is able to classify their traffic strictly by destination port numbers, then there is no reason that they can't just remove their Packetshapers and use Steelhead for both QoS and WAN optimization.

Note that Riverbed's Cascade product does have Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) capability.  Cascade is a separate product, but at least the observation can be made that the DPI technology now exists in-house within Riverbed.

Josh

[sj3vans]

I have a client who is asking me if the Riverbed's QoS can replace the QoS being performed by their Blue Coat PacketShapers.  The Riverbeds are in Port Transparency mode so that the PacketShaper's can classify optimized traffic based on destination port.  Pass-though traffic is identified by the PacketShaper using its normal signatures.  They are unhappy with Blue Coat and would like to see if they can remove that equipment.

I'm thinking that the Riverbed QoS will be sufficient so long as all of the traffic they want to protect can be delineated by one of these criteria:

»Source, destination IP addresses

»Source, destination port numbers

»Protocol field in IP header

»DSCP bits

»VLAN ID

»Optimized or passthrough traffic

Of course, they will no longer be able to classify on things like "P2P" but that may not be necessary and the reduction in hardware and maintenance cost is compelling. Does anyone have a write-up on this by chance?  Is there an RSP option that might be available to supplement QoS if needed?  Thanks!!