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Steelhead Appliance Installation and Configuration Guide
Overview of the Steelhead Appliance
Overview of the Steelhead Appliance
RiOS intercepts client-server connections without interfering with normal client-server interactions, file
semantics, or protocols. All client requests are passed through to the server normally, while relevant traffic
is optimized to improve performance.
The optimization techniques RiOS utilizes are:
Data Streamlining
. Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile can reduce WAN bandwidth
utilization by 65% to 98% for TCP-based applications using Data Streamlining. In addition to
traditional techniques like data compression, RiOS also uses a Riverbed proprietary algorithm called
Scalable Data Referencing (SDR). SDR breaks up TCP data streams into unique data chunks that are
stored in the hard disk (data store) of the device running RiOS (a Steelhead appliance or Steelhead
Mobile host system). Each data chunk is assigned a unique integer label (reference) before it is sent to a
peer RiOS device across the WAN. When the same byte sequence is seen again in future transmissions
from clients or servers, the reference is sent across the WAN instead of the raw data chunk. The peer
RiOS device (a Steelhead appliance or Steelhead Mobile host system) uses this reference to find the
original data chunk on its data store, and reconstruct the original TCP data stream.
Transport Streamlining
. Steelhead appliances use a generic latency optimization technique called
Transport Streamlining. Transport Streamlining uses a set of standards and proprietary techniques to
optimize TCP traffic between Steelhead appliances. These techniques:
ensure that efficient retransmission methods, such as TCP selective acknowledgements, are used.
negotiate optimal TCP window sizes to minimize the impact of latency on throughput.
maximize throughput across a wide range of WAN links.
Application Streamlining
. In addition to Data and Transport Streamlining optimizations, RiOS can
apply application-specific optimizations for certain application protocols (for example, CIFS, MAPI,
NFS, TDS, HTTP, Oracle Forms).
Management Streamlining
. Management Streamlining refers to the methods that Riverbed has
developed to simplify the deployment and management of RiOS devices. These methods include:
Auto-Discovery Process
. Auto-discovery enables Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile to
automatically find remote Steelhead appliances, and to then optimize traffic using them. Auto-
discovery relieves you from having to manually configure large amounts of network information.
The auto-discovery process enables administrators to control and secure connections, specify
which traffic is to be optimized, and specify peers for optimization.
Central Management Console (
CMC). The CMC enables new, remote Steelhead appliances to be
automatically configured and monitored. It also gives you a single view of the overall benefit and
health of the Steelhead appliance network.
Steelhead Mobile Controller
. The Mobile Controller is the management appliance you use to track
the individual health and performance of each deployed software client, and to manage enterprise
client licensing. The Mobile Controller enables you to see who is connected, view their data
reduction statistics, and perform support operations such as resetting connections, pulling logs,
and automatically generating traces for troubleshooting. You can perform all of these management
tasks without end user input.
