The most valuable feature of Steelhead is its optimization capabilities.

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WAN optimization is Steelhead's most valuable feature. 

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It depends upon the enterprise and the application that the organization has. We have used the tool to release one optimization. It depends upon the port account that you are trying to push it across.

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The data reduction was fantastic, saved the company I was working for at the time a lot of time and money in upgrading circuits.

Management of the device is simple, but has all the technical aspects of a powerful appliance.

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The connectivity to speed is the valuable feature. 

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I find the most valuable to be the compression and exchange replication. It is very useful, user friendly, and the documentation manuals are helpful.

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The reports available through the interface are very helpful to understand how effective the solution is working. I was able to validate the data as well with other external monitoring tools.

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Scalable data referencing is the most valuable feature developed by Riverbed. It's also great that you can optimize multiple applications and get better reporting. These days, everybody is looking for visibility and Steelhead enables you to see what's running on your network. You can easily filter the site, the name of an application, the port, source, or destination IP.

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The solution has been very good since the beginning. It is quite reliable. 

It is very easy to install the solution. 

Technical support has been very good.

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1. Inbound QoS
2. Outbound QoS
3. Path Selection
4. SSL optimization
5. The breadth of scope in the “Reports” tab….(Top Talkers, Current Connections, Application Visibility, Optimized throughput, Traffic Summary and many more)

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Mainly "generic features" used for data reduction and TCP window optimization. Some applicative specific optimizations used. View full review »

Aside from optimizing WAN connections between our remote offices and the home office, the charts/real-time graphs proved to be valuable during troubleshooting over-utilization issues. Easily, we were able to determine source/destination and how much data they have used.

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A feature we like is data streamlining. Riverbed does packet deduplication, packet compression and uses something like simple data referencing to compress the data. If one gig of traffic is sent to one link, that gig of traffic coming from the packet is only 100 mbps, so the compression of Riverbed is very powerful.

Another is transport streamlining, which includes TCP optimization. The window size of the TCP protocol is achieved in order to transfer more data in the TCP section despite the endpoint. The endpoint transfer was very slow, but it doesn't matter because with Riverbed in the middle, it can handle more quantities of traffic.

For application streamlining, where the HTTP application previously had a lot of traffic, Riverbed recognizes HTTP protocols and it can optimize the process because it can create the HTTP server. Normally, the browser and web server agree and compress the traffic, but if Riverbed is in between, it strips the compression from the browser and Riverbed does its own compressions, which is more powerful, and hence, the application runs faster for the user.

Also, for HTTP, Riverbed does caching so it can store data from all the user traffic. It keeps track of the HTTP data locally. Traveling into the server isn't necessary. They can retrieve the information locally because there is a local Riverbed.

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Management purchased the product initially for its ability to reduce WAN traffic, especially to overseas partners. However, lately it has also become a valuable traffic shaping tool via it's ability to set QoS marking on traffic we specify.

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• MPLS through OSPF
• VLAN

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I've found the appliance to be the most valuable. Also, it's easy to use and configure.

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The first feature that is valuable is SDR, Scalable Data Referencing. Suppose you have two offices, one based in India and the other one is in the U.S., which is where the data center is. If an engineer is working from India and accessing an application from there, downloading or uploading files or folders over the file server or other applications, SDR will cache the data on the SteelHead device itself. The second time, he won't need to go via the WAN. He will be able to download the file locally. He will feel he is getting LAN-like speed over the WAN.

The second valuable feature is the compression.

The third valuable feature is the TCP optimization. Every time protocols are communicating with each other, every time they establish a connection, three is a three-way handshake. For UDP there is no handshaking because it is connection-less. But TCP does the three-way handshake before delivering any information to the application. The optimization feature caches a particular TCP connection and the next time a user uses that connection he will reach the destination easily.

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• Easy deployment
• Fantastic bandwidth optimization
• Low maintenance requirements

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The data compression through the WAN. It is like being on a LAN. It is even more effective when the technology uses an adaptive transfer scheme known as "warm transfer". View full review »

First of all we are great fan of Riverbed WAN optimization feature which I would say is the most valuable for us as we have couple of low bandwidth scenarios. Apart from this we are using specific Office 365 optimization since we are using Exchange online. We also use EX functionality of the box where we host our VM servers.

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The WAN optimization feature is the most valuable.

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The compression features are valuable, as at most sites it doubled our effective MPLS bandwidth capabilities for transfers.

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