SteelHead CX

Application acceleration for the digital enterprise

• Today’s Riverbed® SteelHead™ CX is engineered for fast, seamless network integration into remote sites and branch offices, or data centers with scalable performance designed to support a growing number of users, devices, data and application types.
• As the market leader in application acceleration, SteelHead CX has proven to dramatically speed up the performance of applications anywhere in the organization while delivering the best end-user experience even under sub optimal network conditions.
• Riverbed makes it easy to assure fast, agile, secure delivery of any application to anyone, anywhere.

Business Challenge

• The traditional enterprise has evolved into a hybrid one with people, apps, and data everywhere. More and more business-critical applications are moving to public clouds for SaaS and IaaS while others remain on-premises in datacenters. Additionally, organizations are leveraging combinations of hybrid networks (MPLS, Internet VPN, and public Internet) for real-time application delivery to location independent users.
• IT is under continued pressure to deliver the highest level of performance in a complex and evolving hybrid network. However, unpredictable application behavior, reduced visibility, and limited control, can all decrease application performance. As a result, businesses and users often experience decreased productivity

Key Benefits

Accelerated application performance and reduced bandwidth consumption

•  Reduces bandwidth utilization by up to 95%, deferring costly network bandwidth upgrades
•  Increases performance by up to 100x for on-premises applications
•  Leverages application awareness to distinguish between business and noncritical network traffic to select optimal acceleration path
•  Offers secure protocols optimization, with options to deploy in Microsoft recommended Tier0 model
•  Enables rapid, resilient, and secure replication and backup over the WAN
• Available with virtual platforms such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Cisco CSP 5400, and KVM-based Nutanix AHV

Integrated visibility

• SteelHead can send Riverbed® SteelFlow, enriched flow data to Riverbed® NetProfiler for analysis of:
•  Optimized network performance
• WAN optimization reporting (i.e., bandwidth reduction)
•  SteelHead QoS configuration and usage

Enhanced control and management

• Performs ongoing centralized management through SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead, Web Interface, or from CLI
•  Discovers and reports on applications in use across the organization
• Leverages simplified configuration with REST API for hybrid features—path selection, QoS, and secure transport—and custom API scripts for monitoring
•  Secures optimized traffic between SteelHead solutions across private and Internet links with standards-based encryption
•  SteelCentral Controller indicates configuration changes as compared to policy

Feature Specifications

SteelHead CX-580/CX-780/CX-3080

• Small office appliances that leverages the full performance capabilities of the hardware. Offers a flexible feature set broken into 3 tiers (Essentials/Standard/Enterprise) depending on the customer requirements. 

SteelHead CX-5080/CX-7080

• Fully featured appliances designed for large offices or datacenters that delivers best in class WAN optimization to accelerate the performance of enterprise applications. Licensing tiers determine the bandwidth and connection performance boundaries.