The Riverbed Experience - Week 1
Within the first day we, as well as our users, noticed a huge difference in WAN speed. The users were saying that they had never seen such a fast connection back to Corporate and we were seeing upwards of 4-5 times WAN data reduction. Since I haven’t talked about the technical workings of the Steelhead appliance yet, this seems like a great time to go over it. The Steelhead offers three types of acceleration. Data reduction, TCP acceleration and application acceleration. Data reduction is the process of breaking down traffic to the bit level and caching it either on the box on a hard drive or in RAM. This allows the device to send traffic over the WAN link with tags instead of whole data. Second, the TCP acceleration portion helps to overcome the window sizing issues that I spoke of above. It changes the way that TCP talks by tunneling the traffic over the WAN link. Finally, the application acceleration piece is what Riverbed has in the bag. It understands how applications such as MAPI, HTTP, HTTPS, and CIFS work among other protocols and accelerates these applications by sending data across that it knows that it will need. This of it as a “type-ahead” sort of feature that you have on your cell phone. As soon as you start to open an email, it might pre-send the commands necessary to reply to that email just in case you might want to in the near future and if you don’t it’s still compressing and accelerating the other data.
The Steelhead did an amazing job in our tests so far. It helped the VOIP traffic a bit by not starving the line of so much bandwidth and it was able to send our Lotus Notes and CIFS traffic across the pipe at an amazing rate. This was a sure winner in our book at this point and we knew our users and statistics would agree.
Juniper In Action - Week 1
The Juniper box works in much the same way as the Riverbed appliance. It was able to accelerate data by using three different levels of acceleration. It would compress data, it would accelerate TCP and it would do application acceleration. The one thing that Juniper had over the Steelhead in the actual data it could handle was that it could work with UDP data as well. This could be very helpful for companies that do a lot of video or voice traffic over their WAN. We found it cause a larger headache for us though because we had not gone through the QOS setups on the devices.
The WXC worked very well though. It gave us about the same increase in bandwidth as the Riverbed appliance and it provided an interesting additional feature. Juniper calls it multipathing. The idea with a multipath setup is that you can use multiple connections (such as a primary WAN connection and a DSL backup connection) to send data to the remote end at the same time. This did not need any routing changes as it would simply tunnel the data over each connection. This could help if you needed additional bandwidth or if you’d like to send your less important data down a different pipe (think backup data or email). This feature does come with a price as it now causes you to create two tunnels or more to each location that you are connecting to but if additional bandwidth is important, this is a large win for Juniper.
Overall so far, both boxes have performed as we expected and in some cases even better than expected. The setup of the Riverbed box was still simpler but the Juniper box had a nice feature that we felt would help Southco. Well, enough for this post. Next time I’ll go into our conclusion on this project. Stay tuned.
