Steelhead Appliance

[Anon494]

We deployed Riverbeds earlier this year but haven't realized the true power of the devices until the past several months where we were able to centralize Exchange to our LA office and just this past weekend completed the centralization of Interwoven to our LA office. We didn't advertise the fact that we were centralizing Interwoven during our weekend maintenance, but the fact that we heard absolutely no complaints on Monday and all of this week tells me that the Riverbed's are miracle devices.

Just today, we started experimenting with backups across the WAN. We achieved about 300Mb of throughput on the first pass backup, and achieved over 600Mb throughput on the 2nd pass, after the Riverbed cached the data. Interestingly, performance was better with compression enabled on the backup job (Veritas) than with compression turned off. We are now proceeding with centralizing our backup to the LA office!

Finally, the reporting capabilities are also extremely useful for understanding the impact of applications on the network. We've an MPLS shop and have access to utilization reports and statistics, but I find the Riverbed reports more comprehensive and meaningful.

Jeff Fisher
IT Manager
Pircher, Nichols & Meeks
jfisher@pircher.com
310.201.8957

[makr1964]

We deployed Riverbeds earlier this year in all of our offices in preparation for centralizing our Worksite data. This has long been a goal of ours, but we were not happy with any of our options prior to this (Interwoven caching servers or long delays when opening documents across the wires). We tested the devices between two of our largest offices, and we were very impressed with how they worked. Optimization alone improved the speed of opening a document by about 50%; once the document was cached, the speed was increased by at least 90%.

Since our testing, we have centralized the documents in 3 of our 5 outside offices to our administrative hub office, and will be fully centralized within the next 3 weeks. We have had no complaints of slowness from anyone at all. We love that we haven't been called on this. The only downside is that it makes it look too easy to the users.

Additionally, we have centralized our Exchange data as well, so there is a lot of traffic going over our WAN. The Rivebeds have been managing the traffic very well.

[bgilbert]

Attached is Riverbed's performance brief covering Interwoven Worksite. The test summary is:

- Up to 25x faster Interwoven Worksite operations across the WAN
- Bandwidth utilization was reduced by over 90%
- Consistent and accelerated performance with Steelhead appliances in Interwoven Worksite environments with and without local caching servers.
- Steelhead appliances enable centralization with enhanced collaboration in Interwoven Worksite environments.

Does anyone have any Interwoven Worksite performance results or any feedback to share?

Message Edited by bgilbert on 01-28-2009 04:41 PM