The Register is reporting that Riverbed has added support to its Steelhead appliance for SSL acceleration in an upgrade of the operating system, RiOS 4.0. Riverbed believes that 15% of enterprise WAN traffic is SSL and that this is growing by 50% each year.
What is a Steelhead and what can it do for you? The Steelhead appliance is a Wide Area Data Network solution. You may have heard of Wide Area File Networks (WADN). These promise to accelerate file serving across the WAN, thus allowing you to centralise your file servers. Great … but what about your other servers …. Oracle, SQL, Notes, Exchange, 3rd party applications? They don’t use CIFS or file sharing as their primary client/server protocol. How do you accelerate that?
The Steelhead implements a WADN by placing an appliance at each office, the central offices and the branch offices. All servers hosting TCP based services can be centralised. The Steelheads break up TCP based traffic into uniquely identified blocks and locally cache those blocks. Repeated blocks are locally served rather than copying them across the WAN. This is kind of like the bandwidth saving you get with Cross File Replication in Windows 2003 R2 DFS Replication on and Enterprise server. Because it’s working at the TCP level you add support for nearly all TCP based protocols .. file sharing/CIFS, SQL, Notes, Exchange, Oracle, the list goes on and on. Difficulties arise with signed or encrypted traffic because the Riverbed Steelhead is a silent "man in the middle", the very thing that security solutions such as encryption and signing hope to defeat. The Steelhead can be configured to let those protocols pass unaffected or you can configure CIFS not to require signing. Riverbed are working on solutions such as the now added support for SSL.
The bandwidth savings are impressive to see in person. The device gives you some great reporting to see how successful it is. I’ve installed some low end appliances in a couple of sites. One had huge CAD drawings being copied across the WAN, a basic DSL line. As time goes by, the performance improves as the Steelheads cache more and more blocks. The first copy of a diagram could have taken 2 minutes. After that, any cross-WAN transfer by anyone in the branch was almost instantaneous. A similar diagram would have similar results … only those blocks of the file that were different would have to be copied across the WAN. Saving changes would be accelerated too …. only the blocks that changed would transfer. My past employer used to do a "try and buy". The result this particular demo was predictable within 30 minutes of the installation. The client ended up buying the devices for this new branch and was asking questions about how to implement them across their existing branches to centralise their servers. Oh … installation is a breeze! Install the appliance between your network and the router, configure addresses of the 3 interfaces, configure partner devices and acceleration rules. Your network and your servers don’t need to know a thing about the appliances.
If you’re interested then I would recommend that you contact Riverbed to be put in touch with a local partner so you can have a closer look at this technology in action.
Credit: The Register.