Steelhead Room for Improvement

Chaudhary Muhammad Moez Manzar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Engineer at Arwen Tech

One area for improvement is related to monitoring and visibility. Specifically, when I created two in-path interfaces between two Steelhead nodes, I faced a limitation in tracking traffic on each channel separately. The current system only provides a comprehensive graph for all traffic passing through, without the ability to distinguish between traffic on interface one and interface two. It would be beneficial if Steelhead could offer more detailed insights, allowing users to monitor and analyze the traffic on each specific interface separately. 

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MK
Datacenter & Infrastructure Senior Engineer at BMB

Steelhead's handling of encrypted traffic could be improved because it requires some complex configuration to optimize encrypted traffic, especially when working with Microsoft protocols for mail servers and VPN services

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SS
Consultant at Edge Tech Providers

I would like to see improvement in the solution’s configuration and protocol aspects. We have some configurations that are not set. I would also like to simplify the call detection of some protocols.

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Buyer's Guide
Steelhead
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Steelhead. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user408528 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Technical Analyst at a government with 10,001+ employees

The version of RIOS that I used was very good, and I can't think of anything that needed major improvement at the time. We were using most of the functionality of the appliances, including Citrix optimizations, and it was all very good.

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Djurre Woudstra - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Engineer at a legal firm with 201-500 employees

They should include a network switch in a future release.

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TS
IT Security Operations Engineer at Midwest Bank of South Africa

The solution needs to have alert notifications. 

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it_user413427 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The advertised “fail open” feature doesn’t work as expected. When upgrading and a reboot is necessary, I expected the traffic to still flow without a single packet loss. This was not the case unfortunately and neighborship was changed during the reboot. Granted, it was brief (about 7 seconds), but it still was not what I expected.

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Akhilesh Mishra - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at M.Tech

The application response time of the solution can be improved. 

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JO
Network Support Engineer at a government with 201-500 employees

We would like the solution to be less expensive.

If the solution was more secure, that would be ideal.

The product should offer more integration capabilities. 

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it_user410316 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 5,001-10,000 employees

SteelCentral Controller global QoS policy should be able to be implemented from the CLI vice only the Web GUI.

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it_user153501 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant with 1,001-5,000 employees
Applicative specifics optimizations shall always be improved. View full review »
it_user403923 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Administrator at a construction company with 51-200 employees

Personally, my expertise with this device I feel is too low to determine what areas could be improved. I did use this device for 3+ years while with another job and administered the web interface and even jumped into the CLI with support at times. However, I have no professional training.

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RM
IT Network Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

It's for a very specific use case. It's not for everything. Although the solution is very powerful, it doesn't apply to all enterprises.

There is only one feature that needs to be improved. In the case of a High Availability event, if we lose the primary Steelhead, all the connections need to be restarted. If we lose the primary Steelhead that handles the optimization, the secondary Steelhead cannot handle the same High Availability. Some applications will restart automatically, but for some other applications, like STP, the users need to start a new session. If we load a primary firewall, the secondary firewall usually handles all the active connections, but in Riverbed, this isn't the case. We lose all the active connections at the moment of failure.

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it_user413271 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Administrator at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Setting up QoS marking is not all that intuitive. I would like to see all settings needed to set QoS up on one page rather than three or four.

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it_user421521 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a government

Not all devices are available for creating the topology as per the need on your network, such as the three switch router or firewall in this product. Nor do they provide help for putting actual and exact data for creating devices as per requirement.

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it_user426486 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see more IP services, perhaps aligned better Netflow stats. The Central Management Console (CMC) newly named SteelCentral Controller (SCC) has rudimentary netflow capabilities, but it doesn’t have particularly in-depth data. I realize the need for a dedicated NetFlow environment but because the SteelHead technology deal with flow and not IP this is not capable.

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AM
Senior Technical Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Application response time and network performance could be improved.

Allot, an Israel-based organization, is offering DDoS attack prevention, not mitigation but prevention; threat response. If Riverbed would offer DDoS or IPS-type stuff, that would be great. Because we are deploying Riverbed in inline mode, we can easily take advantage of these kinds of features.

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it_user421560 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Better logic of the web GUI.

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it_user146331 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Operations Specialist at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Need to handle more traffic simultaneously. View full review »
it_user421635 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. IT Infrastructure and Systems Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

There are issues with the tech support and scalability.

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it_user413307 - PeerSpot reviewer
Validation Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

The RIOS upgrade/download process must be overhauled to be a direct step process instead of the multiple stage procedure that currently take place.

There are lots of bugs detected in each release which give the assumption that it is not being thoroughly tested.

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it_user421509 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Administrator at a logistics company with 501-1,000 employees

I didn't like the way platforms were scaled – if you started with a top end model of one of the tiers, if you needed to upgrade you had to rip and replace the box with a whole new one.

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Buyer's Guide
Steelhead
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Steelhead. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.