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Riverbed: Six months in an enterprise network

Originally published

Today, I received this email from Riverbed:

Cost savings, data protection, and productivity remain top priorities driving major new IT initiatives. As organisations look to accelerate applications, consolidate infrastructure and optimise bandwidth utilisation, they are increasingly turning to WAN optimisation providers like Riverbed to help them face these challenges for their data centre, branch office and mobile worker environments.
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• Run applications up to 100x faster over the WAN
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I had been thinking about writing a post on my experience with Riverbed from an engineering and design perspective. The email prompted me to share these observations.

Advantages

  • Lower costs through smaller links, because less bandwidth is needed.
  • Office backups that copy only the bits changed during the day.
  • Branch offices working with a limited set of documents in global teams. Working together from China, India and the US on a 5 MB file on a central file server performs very well.
  • Centralized web servers in the data centre and SPS work well because the documents are optimized.
  • The mobile client works very well for remote users.
  • Disaster recovery using DFS links.
  • VMware Server 2.0 for running VMs with RiOS 5.5.

Limitations

  • CIFS traffic is not optimized for JPG, AVI and other multimedia content, so most bits still cross the WAN. This is a problem when working with a remote file server without a local share for that content.
  • CIFS traffic is not optimized when searching for files on a remote share. I have seen finance staff search for an important file in a 4 GB folder, generating high link utilization.
  • Encrypted traffic such as HTTPS is not optimized. You can import SSL certificates for intranets to optimize that traffic, but downloads through Lenovo System Updater still copy all the bits. This becomes a problem without a QoS rule when the link is full and users are accessing a remote file share.
  • Some document types do not perform well with Riverbed optimization. I have seen this with Access databases and Excel, Project and AutoCAD files. Some issues are related to bugs, but consider a 25 MB Excel file linked to other files. We still needed a local share for Access databases despite having a central file server with Riverbed optimization.
  • File sharing and print services did not perform well on the appliance. I saw permission issues with its Samba file server. The CUPS print service also struggled with 50 connected users because of high CPU load. This may already have been fixed. With release 5.5, a VM running Windows Print Server can be installed.

I believe Riverbed is promising technology for businesses spread across the world. Microsoft is improving its file-sharing protocols, Riverbed is improving RiOS, and the solution is suitable for all environments. I recommend evaluating it against what you want to achieve.