I've had good experiences with the Riverbed appliances as well. Definitely a leader in my mind when compared to Cisco and Juniper although there are some new niche players that have good solutions depending on the details of your traffic and topology.
One note on the Riverbeds, if you're trying to monitor their effectiveness and the traffic thru them via netflow you'll need to put them in "application port transparency mode". I may have the name of the mode a little off (going from memory) but effectively it forces the TCP ports to remain consistent as the flows are tore down and reconstructed. HTH, Josh -----Original Message----- From: Stefan Fouant [mailto:sfou...@shortestpathfirst.net] Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2011 1:58 PM To: 'harbor235'; 'NANOG list' Subject: RE: riverbed steelhead > -----Original Message----- > From: harbor235 [mailto:harbor...@gmail.com] > Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2011 2:50 PM > To: NANOG list > Subject: riverbed steelhead > > Anyone out there have experience with Riverbed Steelhead products? > Do they improve TCP performance over WAN links? is it worth the price? I've had generally good experiences w/ Riverbed's Steelhead as well as Juniper's WX Series product. For certain types of applications, like email and database replication you can expect to see pretty dramatic reductions in throughput because of the technique of replacing symbols for otherwise long strings of repeatable characters. Also because of the local proxying abilities with regards to TCP ACKs and such, you can also get better pipelining of traffic... As far as whether they are worth the price, this really boils down to a proper Cost/Benefit analysis, but most of the ROI calculators show a return after as little as just a few months. Stefan Fouant
