Data Streamlining

Key Benefits

Optimizes all WAN traffic, both TCP and UDP
Eliminates 60% to 95% of WAN Traffic
Implements QoS mechanisms that account for both latency and bandwidth

Eliminate Redundant WAN Traffic

Data Streamlining optimizes all WAN traffic, typically reducing bandwidth consumption by 60% to 95%. Data Streamlining works by reducing the transmission of redundant bytes and by optionally prioritizing data based on bandwidth and latency requirements. Data Streamlining works across the key applications that enterprises care about the most, like Windows and UNIX file sharing (including MS Office), Email (including MS Exchange and Lotus Notes), CAD/PDM applications, ERP, databases, and performing data reduction on all applications that rely on TCP.

No matter what application generates the data, Data Streamlining removes most redundancy from WAN traffic running over TCP. It even works across different applications. For example, a file could be emailed from someone in headquarters to a colleague in a branch. Then it might be written back to a file share in the data center, backed up across the WAN using a completely different application, and entered into a data management system or SharePoint server. In any of these subsequent transactions, Data Streamlining is intelligent enough to avoid sending the data during subsequent transactions across the WAN.

Steelhead appliances transparently intercept and analyze all of your WAN traffic. TCP traffic is segmented, indexed, and stored as "segments" of data, and the "references" representing that data is stored on disks within Steelhead appliances on both sides of your WAN. Once the data has been indexed, it is compared to data already on the disk. Segments of data that have been seen before are not transferred again across the WAN again; instead a reference is sent in its place that can index arbitrarily large amounts of data, thereby massively reducing the amount of data that needs to be transmitted. One small reference can refer to megabytes of existing data that has been transferred over the WAN before.

Data Streamlining is highly scalable, with peak data reduction ratios that can be as high as a 100:1, and sometimes even higher. At the same time, Data Streamlining can detect very small-grained changes because the average size of a segment stored on disk is approximately 100 bytes, or about the same as a sentence of text. Even block-based differential compression approaches come nowhere near the results that Riverbed delivers.

QoS

In addition to eliminating virtually all redundant WAN traffic, Riverbed offers advanced quality-of-service (QoS) functionality. Riverbeds QoS ensures sufficient bandwidth for key applications like VoIP, live video and thin clients. Yet, unlike other QoS implementations, RiOS allows you to tune your Steelhead appliances to allocate the minimum amount of bandwidth required by accounting for the impact of latency, rather than having to overcompensate by allocating more bandwidth per application then what is really needed. Data Streamlining is flexible enough to work with any existing QoS implementation as well.