Steelhead appliances are simple-to-install solutions to a wide variety of problems that many companies face with their distributed offices and Wide Area Networks (WANs). The appliances are available in a range of sizes to meet the needs of any remote office – from small sales offices with just a few people, to major design centers and corporate facilities with thousands of employees.

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

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.

Transparent 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 the administrator turns off specific ports or protocols.

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 can 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.