The feedback I have received from customers running Enovia is that there is often very little speed-up with Riverbed.
Enovia, which is a collaborative database management software that runs in the Catia environment, is very chatty by nature and Riverbed does not have a layer-7 acceleration module for this app. The customer environments I have come across have local Catia data vaults, but a centralized Enovia database. In this configuration, the chattiness of the Enovia application bottlenecks performance.
If the configuration happens to be a central Catia datastore along with a central Enovia configuration, Riverbed can help with data dedup, TCP optimizations, and layer-7 CIFS acceleration. Even in the presence of a database back-ended PLM like Enovia, I have seen speedup improvements in the order of 4X to 6X when the data accessed through the Steelheads is bulky.
