When I first looked at Riverbed's Steelhead WAN appliance, I found it an impressively easy-to-set-up, streamlined WAN accelerator.
When I reviewed version 2.1.2 a year later, the results proved that my previous performance stats were no fluke, and the addition of Proxy File Service allowed specific performance enhancements for MS SQL and continuous service even if the WAN is down.
Now, after getting the chance to examine the third version of Riverbed's appliance, I'd have to say it's getting even better. The already-impressive performance is supplemented with another speed boost and a wider range of features.
Riverbed recently announced six new WAN acceleration appliances, five of which scale from 15,000 to 1,000,000 optimized TCP connections and up to 4Gbps of optimized throughput, far exceeding the 45Mbps of the last release.
New to RiOS 3 (Riverbed's operating system) are additional CIFS, MAPI, and NFS optimizations, and QoS for all TCP and UDP traffic. One of the biggest gains is in NFS performance. Riverbed's NFS application streamlining improves NFS performance by reducing its chattiness, allowing for a nearly ten-fold improvement over RiOS 2.1, the company says.
The new release includes policy-based QoS for all traffic going out over the WAN, both optimized and pass-through. Per-interface and per-class policies are now built-in. Also new is the ability to prioritize traffic based on bandwidth and latency, providing greater protection to real-time and interactive traffic. RiOS 3 will also address asymmetric routing issues on the client side, helping to simplify integration for remote sites with dual WAN routers and Steelheads.
Not to be ignored, RiOS 3 provides more visibility into WAN performance by exporting to NetFlow and comes with more flexible reporting. The reporting engine in previous versions was a bit anemic, but release 3 looks to give better feedback to network admins. I will have hardware in hand shortly to test and will see just how fast RiOS 3 can go.
Posted by Keith Schultz on September 13, 2006 09:59 AM
