Poorly performing WAN connections are something that employees at remote locations complain about, central offices acknowledge, and management does little to cure. Accelerators provide an excellent solution by maximizing WAN bandwidth and minimizing WAN latency without incurring the costs of duplicating systems at multiple sites.
Riverbed Steelhead -- the perennial leader in WAN optimization -- uses a variety of techniques to data transmission as much as possible, including application- and protocol-specific optimizations and a compression and data deduplication engine that adjusts on the fly. On our tests, the Steelhead appliance with the latest Riverbed operation system, RiOS 6, succeeded in transferring a large CIFS file in less than one-third the time of the transfer done over an unoptimized link. When multiple passes were made with RiOS 6, transmission times declined to 10 percent of the unoptimized link. Somehow, Riverbed manages to deliver more optimization improvements with each passing year. Also add greater network transparency and traffic flow reporting than previous versions, and Steelhead with RiOS 6 is a compelling solution for virtually any distributed enterprise
