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Riverbed SteelHead

Score8.1 out of 10

18 Reviews and Ratings

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Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Riverbed SteelHead are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

Riverbed Steelhead has proven to be an essential tool for enabling remote work conditions. Users have reported a significant reduction in file opening time, going from an excruciating 20 minutes to a mere 1.5 minutes. This improvement has made large files workable and has greatly enhanced productivity for remote workers. Additionally, Riverbed Steelhead is widely used for global application acceleration and as a managed service, providing customers with improved operational efficiency. By optimizing traffic and reducing latency, this product ensures that users can access applications and data quickly, regardless of their location.

Another key use case for Riverbed Steelhead is the optimization of WAN connections between different sites. Organizations that have implemented this product have experienced a remarkable improvement in throughput, allowing for the transmission of compressed and optimized data between production and disaster recovery sites. Moreover, the Steelhead mobile controller plays a vital role in enhancing the end-user experience over VPN connections. By optimizing traffic between the production site and remote users, it ensures that performance is maintained, even when working remotely.

Many organizations also rely on Riverbed Steelhead to optimize traffic and limit bandwidth usage for their remote offices, providing near-local performance for tasks such as file opening and mailbox syncing. This not only improves productivity but also reduces the reliance on expensive MPLS bandwidth. Customers who opt for the Managed WAN Acceleration Service based on Riverbed benefit from having their hardware consistently up and running, ensuring smooth operations without the hassle of maintaining the infrastructure themselves.

Lastly, Riverbed Steelhead offers valuable traffic flow analysis capabilities. This feature allows organizations to gain insights into their network traffic patterns, identify bottlenecks or congested areas, and make informed decisions about network optimization strategies.

Overall, Riverbed Steelhead has demonstrated its value across different use cases by improving file opening times, enhancing operational efficiency, optimizing WAN connections, providing a seamless remote work experience, limiting bandwidth usage, and enabling effective traffic analysis. Its versatility and reliability have made it a go-to solution for organizations looking to maximize their network performance.

Reviews

6 Reviews

Trusted Steelhead

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

When COVID hit we really felt we were remote ready. Although our remote options were good, our Riverbed Steelhead allow our large files to be workable where they were not before. A 20 minute file opening time was cut to only 1.5 minutes bringing us back to office like work conditions. Since then it has only helped to streamline our operations.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are dealing with large CAD files on a daily basis "remotely", Riverbed Steelhead makes your home office feel just like the office.
Kevin Walgren
Technology Lead in Information Technology at Landform (11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Riverbed SteelHead
10 years of experience

Riverbed Steelhead for global centralized datacenters

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Riverbed Steelhead is used within our organization for the global acceleration of all applications and additionally for our customers as a managed service. For this reason, we designed a product based on Riverbed and named it Managed WAN Acceleration Service. Our customers are buying that service and we keep the hardware up and running and in service.

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Riverbed Steelhead is very stable and integrates into applications easily, especially Microsoft and Azure or AWS.
If there is a new Windows version available, the Riverbed version is not far away. The remote locations can work like they are located near the data center. For this reason, you can reduce your global data centers to a minimum. Some customers have just one!
Ralf Richter
Senior Solution Architect in Engineering at Freudenberg IT GmbH & Co. KG (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Riverbed SteelHead
11 years of experience

Riverbed Steelhead - Makes your network speedy!

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Riverbed Steelheads at all of our sites (around 10). They are mainly used to optimise SMB traffic from file servers. This allows us to have near local performance for opening word documents and PDFs. It also helps with Exchange Mailboxes, with a handy feature that continues to sync mail onto the Riverbed Unit even when the client is turned off.

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

Likelihood to Recommend

We found that Riverbed Steelhead is especially good at optimising SMB traffic (Windows File and Folders).
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
Riverbed SteelHead
3 years of experience

Great WAN compression and optimization product

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization uses Riverbed Steelhead devices between our Production site and our Disaster Recovery site. It has drastically improved the throughput of our WAN connection between these locations. Our 100mb connection is often able to carry 800+mb of compressed and optimized data. Additionally, with 11 remote locations, we use the steelhead mobile controller to optimized traffic between our Production site and remote users. This dramatically improves the end user experience over VPN connections.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

WAN optimization and compression, and Mobile VPN optimization.
Tim Slater
Manager, Corporate Services and Information Systems in Information Technology at Forest Practices Board (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Riverbed SteelHead
9 years of experience

Ups and downs of Riverbed

Rating: 6 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Steelhead is used to limit the bandwidth usage for our remote offices.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Steelhead does a good job reducing WAN traffic, but recent instability of code has made the product less desirable than previously.
Kyle Depue
Network Services Manager in Information Technology at Great American Insurance (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Riverbed SteelHead
8 years of experience

Steelhead Riverbed - a solid performer

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have Riverbed Steelhead deployed across our global organization. We use it to optimize traffic, which allows us to use lower MPLS bandwidth than otherwise needed, saving us thousands of dollars. We also use it to analyze traffic flows.

Pros

  • Optimizes traffic, reducing bandwidth needs
  • Gives insight into traffic
  • Simple to set up and deploy

Cons

  • A reduction in price is always welcomed
  • Simplify and streamline advanced features and add-on pieces for more detailed traffic analysis
  • Getting granularity into traffic behavior becomes confusing and very expensive

Likelihood to Recommend

Riverbed Steelhead significantly helps with bandwidth optimization for Microsoft file sharing and Microsoft Exchange. If these services are centralized, Riverbed Steelhead makes sense. Less suitable areas where I might not implement Riverbed Steelhead would include SAP and Web based optimization/bandwidth reduction.
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Riverbed SteelHead
10 years of experience