Hello- I was hoping to get some cisco guy's opinions on which technology is more useful across the WAN.. I am exploring each of these and would like to know some stories about effectiveness and about real life application. Any other technologies that are similar as well? Thanks for your time and I will report back about the decision I have made and why.
snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com
Anybody out there use any of these products? I think that as Engineers this information could be of use to us. At any rate this will be my last transmission on the subject if no one speaks up. I will report back my findings for knowlefge transfer.
If I had the money, I'd buy the Peribit. I was most impressed with them as I looked at all the options a few months ago.
-Bob
Looked at all three (and more). the all have pros and cons. Here are my thoughts after having spent 18 months looking at these devices.
Expand: Came to the realization that 2-3X LZ compression isn't enough anymore. But they came to that realization a bit late. They are a solid company though. The problem is that they support CIFS acceleration through third-party box/technology. They aren't really doing much for other protocols yet. Because they act like a file server, they can handle SMB signature signed packets. So traffic to and from your DCs can be helped along. But the drawback here is, what happens if a user in branch A travels to branch B? The user's "home directory" is now in branch A. Pre-planned DFS has to now come into the picture.
Peribit: Juniper is a good company. They have good reporting features and have built-in Qos support for their accelerated traffic. Their insistence on using memory only for pattern recognition hurt them (I think) and they are now starting to ship with HD enabled boxes.
Riverbed; This is the one we are going with. They have better protocol specific support (mapi, CIFS, SQL) and the usual LZ compression. Their reporting is not as polished as Peribit's, however. Riverbed (in our testing) almost always came out on top in all categories. Since they added "file server like" capabilities, it added yet another dimension to the product.
Something you *MUST* consider if you have dual homed data centers. Ask each and every vendor if they can support asymmetric traffic conditions. i.e. it leaves the branch on link A and returns via link B. You'll find that most vendors will want you to "overcome" this with policy based routing, route injection, NATing, or through wccp. None of which I consider scalable or elegant.
You also need to ask the vendors how they will support large installed bases at the headend (in terms of headend device capacity). I realize this last point may not affect everyone, but if you want to roll out a large scale deployment, it matters in a big way.
Also, ask their strategy for accelerating SSL traffic. Make sure it conforms to your security rules/governance/polices etc.
FWIW, Riverbed won the Wall Street Journal and Infoworld (two years running) for "best technology" These products truly are enabling technologies. In a lot of cases, latency almost becomes a moot point. things like vsat can become a reality.
Our record for throughput was ~60Mbps through a T1. It came about when copying 1.5GB file twice! It's actually kind of neat when you see these products in action. I call it the "Wow!" factor. Most users who see it for the first time tend to say that word! :)
BTW, you can google this group for "riverbed" and you'll see my post from last year.
Feel free to email me if you want more info.
Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.