How effective is Riverbed Steelhead?

The Steelhead boxes seems very good at optimizing WAN traffic. And when the opportunity passed me I gave it a shot at home.

My setup is pretty straight forward. I have connected the Riverbed between my LAN and my firewall. The other Riverbed is placed behind my company firewall, and both are connected together through VPN over Internet.

Below you can see some graphs (from my Riverbed) that shows how much data that are optimized. At the end I will talk about what kind of traffic that are optimized and how I have set it up.

Setup and use

The following optimizations have been in use:

• SSL encrypted traffic from the company mail server. (Without prefetching.)
• CIFS.
• Lotus Domino.
• HTTP.

Except some file copying to try performance I have not run any test cases. I have only worked as normal and let the Riverbed figure out for itself what it can do.

I do not plan to conclude with anything here, just show that it works.