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In 2005 Kelly Communications Systems became a Certfied Member of the The Riverbed Partner Network in order to serve our customers with the WAN optimizing technology of Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead appliance product family.
About Riverbed
Riverbed is a pioneer in Wide-area Data
Services (WDS) – the first comprehensive solution to a host of
severe problems that plague enterprise WANs:
- Poor application performance
- Insufficient bandwidth into remote sites
- Difficulties in site consolidation
- Challenges with remote data backup and replication
Unlike point products that improve one part of the WAN performance problem – like compressing data, adding QoS, or improving TCP performance – WDS is the only comprehensive solution to remote office IT problems.
Riverbed Steelhead WDS appliances address all of the issues that affect WAN application performance, improving the throughput of applications you rely on every day – including your file system, email, backup, Notes®, FTP, as well as ERP and CRM solutions.
Wide Area Data Services (WDS) Wide-area Data Services encompass several different application acceleration categories. Whether you are focused on making the most of your WAN bandwidth by reducing traffic, or on the performance of your global applications, you need a comprehensive solution that addresses all aspects of the problem.
WDS is really the superset of several existing categories:
- WAN Optimization or Network Compression
- Wide Area File Systems (WAFS)
- Traffic Shaping or Quality of Services
- Web Caching
- Web Application Acceleration
Unlike these individual approaches that only address a single aspect of slow application performance on WANs, a complete WDS solution addresses several – ideally all of them – simultaneously.
Every Steelhead appliance comes with the fundamental set of optimization algorithms:
- Scalable Data Referencing (SDR) to remove all redundant WAN traffic
- Virtual Window Expansion to improve the behavior of TCP
- Application-specific optimizations, including Transaction Prediction, to reduce the WAN round trips and minimize the payload generated by specific applications
Optional software modules will become available to add more optimizations for specific applications.
All Steelhead appliances are fully symmetric (that is, they optimize traffic in both directions), transparent to your applications, and require no configuration or client and server software.
Features and BenefitsTransparent Deployment Steelhead appliances do not require any client-side or server-side configuration. Your applications will continue to work just as they did before Steelhead appliances were deployed – only faster. There is no proxy configuration required, nor do any routing tables that need to be adjusted.
Universal TCP Optimization Steelhead appliances optimize all TCP traffic unless specific ports or protocols are turned off by the administrator.
Extensible Architecture Steelhead appliances are built on an application-independent architecture that optimizes all TCP traffic for bandwidth and TCP behavior. On top of this architecture, Riverbed has built a series of application-specific latency modules (known as Transaction Prediction modules) that further optimize applications like Windows and Exchange. Riverbed will continue to release Transaction Prediction modules for more applications as customers give us feedback on the ones that give them the most problems over their WAN.
Scalable Data Referencing Steelhead appliances use Scalable Data Referencing (SDR) to optimize all TCP traffic by removing redundant data and transmitting only the changed data along with references to the existing data. Using SDR reduces WAN traffic by 75% to 95% in most cases.
Transaction Prediction Using Transaction Prediction, Steelhead appliances improve the performance of specific applications by reducing the WAN round trips generated by applications.
Ten-Minute Installation Steelhead appliances be deployed quickly and easily, often in ten to fifteen minutes. The boxes can be pre-configured at the factory if you provide the required information. Then you can literally open the box and plug your new Steelhead appliance into the network.
Web GUI and CLI Steelhead appliances can be managed through a rich GUI or command-line interface. This way appliances can be set up, configured, and managed remotely.
Extensive Reporting All Steelhead appliances can report traffic and network optimization, and segment reports by port, protocol, or IP address range.
Centralized Management If you have many Steelhead appliances, you can deploy a separate, optional Central Management Console (CMC) appliance which allows you to configure and manage many Steelhead appliances simultaneously. Riverbed CMC appliances are available in a range of capacities, allowing you to manage anywhere from 10 to 500 Steelhead appliances.
Highly Configurable The default state for Steelhead appliances is to intercept and optimize all TCP traffic. However, administrators have the option to restrict or specify optimization by protocol, port, or IP address range.
Flexible Deployment Steelhead appliances can be deployed in many places in the network. They can be deployed in-path, out-of-path, in various high-availability configurations, near specific servers, or virtually anywhere that meets your needs.
Auto-Discovery If two Steelhead appliances are deployed in-path, they will automatically detect each other without any further configuration.
Fail-through NIC All Steelhead appliances come with a dual port NIC, so that in the event of software or hardware failure, the NIC card fails through. In this case, the Steelhead appliance becomes a bump-in-the-wire, ensuring you don’t lose connectivity.
High-Availability Configurations Steelhead appliances can be deployed in a variety of high-availability configurations to ensure that you continue to get optimized performance in the event of an appliance failure.
RAID Steelhead appliance Models 3010 and 5010 feature an integrated RAID to improve disk reliability.
Dual Power Supplies
Steelhead appliance Models 3010 and 5010 feature dual power
supplies to improve reliability.