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Riverbed SteelHead

Score8.1 out of 10

18 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Riverbed SteelHead?

San Francisco based Riverbed Technology offers Steelhead, a WAN optimization solution. The new SteelHead 90 series appliances are designed to provide performance, security, scalability, data movement efficiency, and resilient networking.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Riverbed SteelHead.
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Trusted Steelhead

Incentivized
Kevin Walgren
Technology Lead in Information Technology at Landform (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Data Reduction
  • Increase Speed
  • Make Large CAD Files Workable

Cons

  • Even More Speed
  • Greater and Faster Data Reduction
  • Increased Dashboard Capabilities

Most Important Features

  • Speed
  • Data Reduction
  • Office-like Feel While Remote

Return on Investment

  • Saved Us Work
  • Saved Time
  • Helped Keep Profit

Alternatives Considered

Silver Peak VX, Oracle API Manager, CenturyLink Adaptive Network Security Services and Advanced Cloud Engage

Other Software Used

Autodesk Civil 3D, Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, Microsoft Teams

Riverbed Steelhead for global centralized datacenters

Incentivized
Ralf RichterView profile
Senior Solution Architect in Engineering at Freudenberg IT GmbH & Co. KG (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Remote sites to datacenters
  • Performance over long distances
  • Security over WAN

Cons

  • Integration of public clouds with their licensing
  • All hardware in one controller like Steel-Connect

Return on Investment

  • Has to be integrated into the total cost, e.g. WAN
  • High costs in startup for hardware & service
  • Cloud Steelhead available, too

Alternatives Considered

Cisco Wide Area Application Services

Other Software Used

Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, Cisco Application Control Engine

Great WAN compression and optimization product

Incentivized
Tim SlaterView profile
Manager, Corporate Services and Information Systems in Information Technology at Forest Practices Board (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Effectively improves data throughput over VPN WAN connections.
  • Seamless operation.
  • Optimizes a variety of applications. Including, HTTPS, Citrix, Netapp SM and SV, Exchange, etc.

Cons

  • It would be great if Riverbed extended these capabilities to cellphones and tablets.

Return on Investment

  • Great cost savings for expanded WAN connections.
  • The maintenance cost of the devices is high.

Ups and downs of Riverbed

Incentivized
Kyle DepueView profile
Network Services Manager in Information Technology at Great American Insurance (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • For many protocols, Steelhead does not need any tuning to provide benefit.
  • In our offices that are using SnapMirror replication we've seen over 90% optimization.

Cons

  • We've had a recurring issue with SPORT errors causing Steelhead to crash across our environment. This has been an issue across several versions of code.
  • Steelhead will randomly drop out of the AD domain thus disabling SMB2/3 optimization and encrypted MAPI optimization.

Return on Investment

  • We've been able to increase the amount of data we are replicating and thus increasing our recover ability in the case of DR.

Other Software Used

Infoblox IPAM, Cisco Cloud Web Security, Cisco ASA

Riverbed Steelhead - Makes your network speedy!

Incentivized
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • File and Folder Optimisation
  • Microsoft Exchange Optimisation
  • Data Bandwidth Reporting

Cons

  • We found that the Citrix optimisation wasn't as fast as we had hoped

Return on Investment

  • Files now open a lot quicker, at near local speeds.
  • We are able to respond to customers quicker as we can get access quicker.

Other Software Used

Zendesk, Microsoft 365 Business