Customer increases bandwidth by 462 times...holy cow!

A customer in the not-for-profit rehab business recently shared with me how they are using their Riverbed Steelhead appliances to optimize the traffic over their WAN when anti-virus signature updates have to be applied from the central data center to user's branch office and remote worker PCs.

I have to warn you that the following results are unbelievable:

This report page directly from the customer's Steelhead 2020's management console shows that 30.8GB of data that would have been transferred over the WAN, was actually deduplicated by the Steelhead appliances down to only 68.4MB of data.  That's a stunning 99% effective data reduction and a capacity increase of 462 times!

Imagine if the Steelhead appliances were not in place and that traffic had to traverse this customer's WAN.  Ouch!

So what makes this application so optimizable?  It turns out that anti-virus signatures are big in size, but only a small amount of the data is actually new between updated signatures.  Steelhead appliances were able to extract out the differences and only send the specific updates over the wire.  In this customer's case, their webroot anti-virus software was seamlessly and quickly updated across user machines with very little impact to their WAN.

Pretty cool huh?