Riverbed vs the world

[Iceman]

Out of curiosity, before you reach for the WAN optimizer, have you looked at things like DFS replication for your file shares.. and any other specific solutions?

[RavenKittie]

Originally Posted by Dekkar

Interwoven Worksite

Just out of curiosity has anyone suggested the use of a WorkSite Cache Server at the Melbourne Office? There is a licensing cost involved and other soft costs etc but sometimes if you can get an average latency of 50ms or under between sites that might fit the bill for you.

[phrosty-boi]

considered the juniper WXC kit by any chance?

[Ding.Chavez]

I do not recommend Riverbed from my experiences with them.

Go Bluecoat all the way, you won't be sorry. I lub mine!

[Dekkar]

I dont think replication is really an option. Worksite has a kind of replication service called a cache server....

But from the people I have spoken with, its not all its cracked up to be...


We currently have some Riverbed Steelheads in place right now, put them in on the weekend...

So we shall see how it goes... will report back with my findings..


Once I have a baseline of performance..... Then we can try putting in a bluecoat or juniper and compare.......

will look at the http://www.trafficsqueezer.org/ option.... looks interesting!

[AzzKikr]

I have much <3 for Riverbed - we have them deployed globally, and other than some oddness with certain protocols (here's looking at you, Netapp) there's been no issues.

We see our biggest optimisations from SMB, as shown below. For those unfamiliar with the product - that's 1,603,556KB in through the LAN, and 37,481KB transmitted out through the WAN (so ~1.5GB crunched to ~37MB).


Click to view full size!

Not half bad, IMHO.

-A.

[Dekkar]

wow..... is that some kind of caching option?


I would have them in here tomorrow of they were sub 10k a box....


I think maybe our business is too small to afford them.

[DavidRa]

Originally Posted by Dekkar

wow..... is that some kind of caching option?

I would have them in here tomorrow of they were sub 10k a box....

I think maybe our business is too small to afford them.

The little ones aren't too expensive, the cost scales with size/capability though. Edit: If you have Steelheads, congratulations you have the same compression/optimisation in place now!

It's a combination of caching, compression, smart use of protocols etc; just understand that you can't solve every problem with them (classic use case from a past environment - saving large encrypted spreadsheets across the WAN).

Edit: There are (were?) also some weirdnesses in terms of things like signed/encrypted SMB, which may significantly affect your analysis. Be cautious

[Oblong Cheese]

Originally Posted by Dekkar

wow..... is that some kind of caching option?


I would have them in here tomorrow of they were sub 10k a box....

Caching, file-diffs, reducing the chattiness of TCP/IP & L4 protocols, etc.

Other products will say they are "as good as Riverbed" and show you a graph or two where they are some small % better, but when you look across the entire feature set of Riverbed versus their competitors you see why they cost so much and are so well-regarded by fans.

I find some people don't like Riverbed but it's usually because they had trouble with a specific implementation or they simply don't understand the potential for performance gains, i.e. they prefer some competing device because they thought the GUI was easier to use (RB has an awesome GUI IMO), or other fickle reason.

You should purchase and install the product that suits your budget and required use cases, but there is a reason Riverbed is 'best of breed'.

[AzzKikr]

Originally Posted by Dekkar

wow..... is that some kind of caching option?

Originally Posted by Oblong Cheese

Caching, file-diffs, reducing the chattiness of TCP/IP & L4 protocols, etc.

^^ This.

SMB/CIFS is an exceedingly chatty protocol - it goes back and forward between the server and client for ~20 exchanges, and that's even before it starts sending data. The Steelhead cuts this traffic out by proxying the connection, so that the chatter is only between the local PC and Steelhead, and the WAN traffic is pure data transfer.

The Steelhead also does smart caching, by checksumming frequently accessed files at the block level and sending data that doesn't exist on the remote Steelhead.

The other thing going for the Steelhead is its' stupidly simple configuration and installation procedure - you can quite literally take it out of the box, plug it in, configure an IP and it'll start optimising from the get-go with no further configuration. If you want to tweak it further, then you can dive into the options... but by and large, you don't need to.

I've used Expand, Exinda, Cisco WAAS (eww), etc... they don't have a patch on the Steelhead in terms of functionality.

Also, a 'baby' Steelhead 250M should set you back ~$7500. They're not cheap, but they're also not $10K+, and are well worth the expenditure when you consider what you get.

-A.

[MrvNDMrtN]

But the aggregation device is going to be 10k plus...

Well worth it?

Definately worth it if you have the resources to manage the product... bugs/problems and all.

[Oblong Cheese]

Originally Posted by AzzKikr

The Steelhead also does smart caching, by checksumming frequently accessed files at the block level and sending data that doesn't exist on the remote Steelhead.

I think you'll find it's actually better than block-level caching: the data dictionary is byte-level, not block level.

[username_taken]

We had some amazing successes with our outsources on the baby riverbeds ... to the point where the spinning metal on them became the bottleneck. We switched to the virtual appliance and filled it with SSDs and it then started bottlenecking @ the 1gbps LAN port ... a bottleneck that we were okay to deal with.

we were actually their first customer to do this, and they introduced a new iops based pricing model shortly thereafter

[QuakeDude]

Originally Posted by scrantic

Is it worth chucking Citrix Branch Repeater into the mix? http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/pr...tentID=2317058

I think this a good option - The Citrix units are surprisingly good, and definitely priced competitively.

We run 180 branch repeaters across our sites in Aus, and I've got 4 running in Asia providing both Wan optimisation as well as file caching.

OP: Everyone will be recommending what they're used to, but make sure you evaluation ALL the options out there.

[bsbozzy]

We recently put some riverbeds into action, mainly for RDP and SMB, about a 75% reduction in traffic for RDP, SMB we haven't done any significant testing with.

I heard a story from a colleague who told me that a place he not long started looking after had a fair amount of citrix gear and riverbed gear doing different things on the network, they had a severe power surge which the UPS's caught but somehow every piece of citrix gear fried itself yet every other piece of equipment connected to the same pdu/ups was fine.