+3 I tested both Cisco Waas, and Riverbed. We we're using a product called Tacit, that has since been bought and sold and EOL'd now so it was time to change. Riverbed really outshined Waas. The Cisco product was (and still is IMHO) being defined inside Cisco, and I had two code upgrade patches that came out during testing that was like pulling teeth to get to work properly. Exchange 2007 on Wass with the default encryption was painful, and half-baked at the time (might be better now). Also, if you plan on using there remote user solution Cisco's product is a totally separate product and requires it's own infrastructure. The Riverbed units, just plain worked great going in. I've had 0 issues or complaints with file locking issues, or other oddities that used to plague us with the Tacit solution. The Steelhead mobile clients require a Steelhead Mobile controller for licensing (can be run on a vm inside a normal Steelhead server) but they use our already in-place Steelhead servers to connect to, and the process is pretty seamless. We also got rid of all of our remote office domain controllers and print servers and run a Windows 2008 vm on the Steelhead servers in those offices now to reduce our footprint. One complaint I have with them is that on the smaller units they are still 32-bit, so you can't run 2008R2 on them as a vm although I'm told there going to be "fixing" that issue soon (which to me means the cpu must already be 64-bit).
Best thing about it is that it just plain works. Good Luck! -Greg -----Original Message----- From: Angus Scott-Fleming [mailto:angu...@geoapps.com] Sent: Monday, April 12, 2010 9:02 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Riverbed Steelhead appliances v. Cisco WAAS v. Citrix Branch repeater On 12 Apr 2010 at 10:06, Derrenbacker, L. Jonathan wrote: > > I tested all of the major wan optimizers about 2 years ago including > Riverbed Steelheads, Cisco WAAS, and the Citrix product. The end > result is the Riverbed blew everyone out of the water. It wasn´t even > close. I initially thought the Citrix product would be best since at > the time all wan users used citrix for 100% of their work, but what I > found after installing demo units is the ICA protocol was apparently > not being optimized to the degree I had anticipated. I worked with > engineers of the product who explained how the ICA optimization worked > which after understanding it I wasn´t too impressed. The users notice > no real difference.When I put the steelheads in, the performance > increase was so great I actually eventually pulled everyone at all > remote sites off of citrix with the exception of 2 database apps that > still have to go through citrix because they´re too chatty. I average > a 7x bandwidth increase with the steelheads with their compression. IMO, they > might cost a lot more, but are worth every penny. Is Microsoft's new Branch Office Server attacking this same problem? -- Angus Scott-Fleming GeoApps, Tucson, Arizona 1-520-290-5038 Security Blog: http://geoapps.com/ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
