SteelHead SD combines the power of industry-leading WAN optimization with innovative SD-WAN and Cloud Networking capabilities within a streamlined single-appliance. The solution delivers IT speed, scalability, simplicity and cost savings.
It allows organizations to take a radically new approach to networking and build performance-centric operations that efficiently deliver the network agility and performance required to support today’s businesses. SteelHead SD unifies industry leading optimization, network connectivity and orchestration of application delivery across hybrid WANs, remote LANs and cloud networks with comprehensive end-to-end application, network and end-user visibility.
SteelHead SD provides the ability to quickly and easily provision new branch sites, deploy applications remotely and automatically optimize applications to ensure optimal performance. It provides the greatest bandwidth savings and latency acceleration for cloud, SaaS and the latest generations of secure application protocols.
SD-WAN capabilities include several differentiators—ubiquitous and unified connectivity across LAN, WAN and the Cloud; business aligned orchestration for fast, agile, and secure application delivery; and unique cloud-centric work ow, easy menu-driven network design of sites, zones, uplinks, and rules and centralized, business intent-based policy management—all within a simple graphical user interface—for ease of use and greater business agility. The solution provides comprehensive visibility, performance and agility that organizations need to cost effectively manage today’s complex enterprise for optimal business productivity.
The Business Challenge
Businesses are increasingly reliant upon applications so business performance now equals IT performance. Meanwhile, IT is under continued pressure to deliver the highest level of performance, within a budget, ina complex and evolving hybrid network. The sheer volume of applications in use has grown along with other complexities; modern applications are encrypted, making it dif cult to identify, classify, and treat them with appropriate priority.
Applications continue to transition to the cloud—public, private, SaaS—making the hybrid cloud a permanent part of the enterprise. Organizations also leverage combinations of hybrid networks (MPLS, Internet VPN, and public Internet) and must balance bandwidth for application performance while also ensuring secure access. These complexities challenge IT and put application performance at risk, resulting in a loss of business productivity.
IT must be able to meet new and ongoing business needs quickly, cost-effectively, and without any compromise to security and performance.
Multi-vendor approaches to combining WAN optimization and SD-WAN network services naturally compromise end-to-end application-centricity as packets flow between WAN optimization and SD-WAN functions. Riverbed SD-WAN and WAN Optimization services seamlessly.
integrate to maintain the identification and classification of applications end-to-end, enabling application-centric visibility and control across your hybrid WANs, Cloud (SaaS, IaaS) Networks, and Branch LAN/WLANs.
Key Benefits
Converged Solution
- Single appliance unifying WAN optimization and SD-WAN functionality
- Independent virtual services, with upgrade independence
- Flexibility to enable or disable SD WAN capabilities with a simple software toggle
Agility
- Quickly respond to the needs of your business with application-defined, business intent-based policies that are centrally managed and applied network-wide across all remote locations
- Zero touch provisioning and rapid change management
Network Efficiency
- Reduced bandwidth utilization by up to 95%
- Optimization and application acceleration in every type of cloud environment
- Automatic identification and classification of over 1,300 applications
Operational Efficiency
- Centralized, business-intent-based global policy management
- More resilient, highly available WAN with full, dynamic use of multiple links at branches
- Secure application delivery across the hybrid enterprise through secure network services and integrated firewall capabilities
- Automated cloud networking and performance with single-click cloud deployment
Business Productivity
- Improved application performance and data transfer up to 100X
- Ensured end-user experience with comprehensive application, network and end user device monitoring
- Unique application-centric policies for agile enforcement of security and performance
Key Features
Industry Leading Optimization
- Reduced data redundancy and latency through data, application and transport streamlining, and SaaS and cloud intelligence
- Reduced internet traffic with a fully embedded, transparent HTTP(S) proxy for local connection termination and Web object caching, including video
Dynamic Path Selection
- Path Quality Monitoring – provides visibility into the quality of each path in the overlay network including virtual paths, like QoS traffic classes, and reports on exceptions
- Quality-based Path Selection—defines the application’s path and can make path decisions to maximize application service needs, including link status, packet loss, latency and jitter
- Simple to deploy—without complex and tightly coupled router configurations—a single global policy maps applications to the appropriate paths across SD-WAN and hybrid networks
- Dynamically reroutes applications to ensure no impact to users in the event of a performance issue
Dynamic Native Routing
- Coexist with branch (customer edge) routers or replace the router with SteelHead native routing, thus eliminating time spent manually coding CLI for the legacy router configuration
- WAN side routing eBGP (path vector) protocol, followed by OSPF—to deal with MPLS complexity and LAN side routing OSPF, followed by iBGP for reducing branch routing complexity
- Eliminate network complexity with its design-first approach and centralized, policy-based management
Comprehensive Visibility
- Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) provides unique visibility into more than 1,300 applications, more than any other vendor, allowing visibility beyond SSL, and into differentiated individual applications within Microsoft Office 365 or Lync, for example
- Applications with similar business intent are organized into logical groups for easier reporting, troubleshooting and configuration of network policies to streamline management
- Complete end to end network performance(NPM), application performance monitoring(APM) and end-user device monitoring facilitates problem resolution for optimal application performance
