riverbed steelhead

[sfouant at shortestpathfirst.net (Stefan Fouant)]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: harbor235 [mailto:harbor235 at gmail.com]
> Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2011 2:50 PM
> To: NANOG list
> Subject: riverbed steelhead
> 
> Anyone out there have experience with Riverbed Steelhead products?
> Do they improve TCP performance over WAN links? is it worth the price?

I've had generally good experiences w/ Riverbed's Steelhead as well as
Juniper's WX Series product.  For certain types of applications, like email
and database replication you can expect to see pretty dramatic reductions in
throughput because of the technique of replacing symbols for otherwise long
strings of repeatable characters.  Also because of the local proxying
abilities with regards to TCP ACKs and such, you can also get better
pipelining of traffic...

As far as whether they are worth the price, this really boils down to a
proper Cost/Benefit analysis, but most of the ROI calculators show a return
after as little as just a few months. 

Stefan Fouant