We have a large worldwide network with over 1500 sites still being serviced by a legacy data center while larger and redundant data centers are implemented. Our sites can be as small as one user to as large as several thousand. When we first started deploying Steelheads, it was solely for the benefit of the field sites needing extra bandwidth to ensure support for specific mission critical applications. Everyone was impresses by how much optimization the Riverbed appliances provided for some key encrypted SSL applications with very specific data such as biometrics (between 50% and 90% reductions).
As time when on and more and more Steelheads were deployed, those of us responsible for the network began to realize that the field sites were not the primary benefactor to the bandwidth reductions. There had been concerns whether the legacy data center would be able to handle the continued growth in field sites and application data volume that a post-9/11 world has generated. Over time, we watched the amount of data the actual legacy data center handle increase drastically, but our WAN circuits were increasingly able to handle the extra bandwidth demands as more Steelheads were deployed to the field. Each field site that received Steelheads appliances represented a reduction in WAN circuit utilization at the data center. A recent Bandwidth Optimization report for the data center showed 14.4 TB of data generated on the LAN side and only 2.9 TB of data generated on the WAN side for an 80% total reduction. Riverbed not only improved many of our field sites, but it saved our legacy data center during the implementation phase of the new centers.
