On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 12:49 PM, harbor235 <harbor235@gmail.com> wrote:
Anyone out there have experience with Riverbed Steelhead products? Do they improve TCP performance over WAN links? is it worth the price?
I'll let others answer the specific question about Riverbed. I've heard plenty of good things about them though. (forgive me if this is extremely basic) If the problem is that someone downloading a big file slows the whole office down, there may be cheaper ways of solving this. Assuming your WAN links are private connections (not VPN over internet), I'd also suggest before spending money that you ensure you are doing some sort of fair queuing with RED/WRED enabled. This will ensure with on a network dominated by typical business TCP that one user can't monopolize a circuit. I'd also ensure that you are not sending bits faster than your provider will allow (beyond your burstable bit rate) by ensuring your bandwidth selections on your interfaces are set correctly. You might be able to fix your users' concerns/complaints just by a few lines of router config (and if you're using anything beyond home routers, your routers probably already support these things). In my experience, the problem isn't that the line is too small for the workload, but rather that bulk transfers keep everyone from doing work over it - that's where fair queuing and WRED come in. If you've already done this, than please ignore this suggestion. :) -- Joel Maslak