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Anyone use Riverbed, or Cisco WAAS at there work?

ViviTheMage

ViviTheMage

Lifer
We are considering it, as we've got 14 remote branches (within the state, but still remote), and were looking at some options to speed up certain things.

It's either, we get Riberbed at each location, and keep the current T1's, or get new servers for each branch, with server 2008 and keep the T1's.

Anyone have any experience? Or maybe know of a tool similiar we could run on our windows servers?

A lot of our traffic is shared drive traffic, and domino/exchange traffic.
 
From what I have seen in other areas of the network (not my sections yet) the riverbeds are excellent at compressing all the junk that is not compressed normally over the link as well as acting as a fantastic cache server for the web.

DFS-R is only minimally effected by the riverbeds, remote servers access via SMB however tends to compress well as does lotus traffic. The riverbeds have also had the side effect of doing a great job of acting like the microsoft update site. To the point that several admins have disabled the WSUS's local cache of updates and let the machine update from the web. The riverbeds intercept the update request and feed it the cached update accomplishing close to the same effect as the WSUS server while still letting fully mobile users download from microsoft.com.

We however use both unless the remote site is only 5ish people. You need to look at the load and size of files being worked with. Something like Excel / Word docs will typically work well over a riverbed. A remote CAD station won't and will benefit from DFS-R far more.
 
What is the price per branch typically? For the low end riverbed units?

Our goal is to eliminate servers at branches, and replace them with these riverbed boxes. Some branches have 5 people, and a few have 25-60.

We want to centralize everything.

Have you looked at WAAS at all, or was it pretty much a gung hoe into Riverbed?

I am having a hard time finding pricing, or any user/company reviews for these guys, outside of what is on their website.

How does it attach to the network? Do you just throw it in? Or do you have to hook it up before a router? What kind of power plugs are they?
 
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My corp office was all Riverbed. Steelhead 550s were about $7500 + SCPS License was $1500ish and the 2gig memory option was $500ish with $1600ish for support. I don't recall what the "central" one was or the cost. They do tend to make the T1's act like "T2.5s."

Out the door for one side was easily 11k

We had once huge one centrally and all the babies are out in the world.
 
11k yearly, per unit/branch?

Yeah, we'll have a beefy one at our headquarters, then smaller ones at branches. What type of power plugs are they?

Did you guys even consider WAAS?
 
ViviTheMage said:
11k yearly, per unit/branch?

Yeah, we'll have a beefy one at our headquarters, then smaller ones at branches. What type of power plugs are they?

Did you guys even consider WAAS?
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Like I mentioned, it was a corporate thing, so if they did consider WAAS they didn't tell me. It was 11k out the door but only $1600 or so was the yearly gold support.

EDIT:

11k for one side of the connection. That doesn't include anything of the big one.
 
ViviTheMage said:
That isn't bad after yearly, if it makes it 'feel' like 3+ mbps
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Yeah when you take in to account the 'savings' that a bigger line would add it can be beneficial.

The key thing is to watch what your doing with the line. Compression won't do a ton and have little apparent effect on a heavily loaded line which moves ZIP files. It tends to work "magic" on SMB with smaller things like (sanely sized) word and excel files and Notes traffic. I don't know how compressible exchange traffic is though. They do allow you to configure some by-pass stuff so VoIP and the like still works fine.

They tend to work really well in tandem with DFS-R servers on the larger sites and work fine solo on the smaller ones.
 
ViviTheMage said:
Yeah, we were also curious about VoIP, since we have it all QoS'd. How well does it handle QoS'd traffic?
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You need to tell it to honor the QoS and then it will pass it. You also can configure it to simply pass certain protocols or certain IP's. You can just plug the PBX IP addresses in it and set it so if the source and/or dest contains that ip(s) to just pass the data.

I believe but have not tested that you can have it handle vlans. However I personally configure the IP phones to use a seperate vlan that terminates (IP gateway) right at the router bypassing the unit entirely.
 
Been real happy with riverbed. If you give them a call they will hook you up with an integrator and let you demo a pair to see if it does what you want it to. They'll help with sizing as well. And if you decide to keep it then they'll let you keep it in place and you just purchase it.
 
Can you tie it right into the network, or do we have to drop it in before our routers/firewall?

What type of power plugs are they?

We'll definitely get a demo, just getting some quick feedback from outside of Riverbed users.
 
so you like them better than dual T-1's (cost is about the same here). dual t-1's with loop is definitely less than $11K a year with redundancy if you do simple bonded static
 
So you're looking at 11k up front CAPEX with a $1600 annual maintenance expense per site... roughly $5,500 - $5,600 a year per remote site depending on your cost of capital.

How much would it cost to put your sites on Metro ethernet or look at a VDI (virtual desktop) environment instead? WAN accelleration technology certianly had it's uses but I find it somewhat oversubscribed as a silver bullet to all branch office network performance issues when other engineering solutions might have a better ROI.
 
No metro Ethernet, VDI's aren't possible with the software we run as well. We do not run common applications.

We don't really have issues right now, we are just looking to either get rid of branch servers, or go with a WAN acceleration technology and centralize everything. If we get servers for each branch, we're locked into that for at LEAST 4-5 years. And the future looks to be going with centralized, seeing as our T1's are getting cheaper and cheaper, we'll be adding second lines, or doing other options for bandwidth.

We have a webex at 10AM today, we'll see how well that turns out for us.
 
ViviTheMage said:
No metro Ethernet, VDI's aren't possible with the software we run as well. We do not run common applications.

We don't really have issues right now, we are just looking to either get rid of branch servers, or go with a WAN acceleration technology and centralize everything. If we get servers for each branch, we're locked into that for at LEAST 4-5 years. And the future looks to be going with centralized, seeing as our T1's are getting cheaper and cheaper, we'll be adding second lines, or doing other options for bandwidth.

We have a webex at 10AM today, we'll see how well that turns out for us.
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Honestly, distributed site servers that move the files back to a central location is a very viable method to do this also. 2003 R2 and 2008 R2 DFS-R is incredibly powerful and has had no issue running over VPN'd DSL lines with site local shares of 50+ gig here. Over a T1 point to point I was able to support 200+ gig with minimal issue. General access was 15+ gig a day (at the 200gig site) but the differential updates really cut down on transfer times. The file back log was rarely in the double digits even with a daytime limit of 768k. You then back up the central store and ignore the site servers.
 
We don't really use DFS-R, We have a location with a VPN'd cable, and it's been working great, we're considering moving some of the smaller branches over..save the 600$~ or so a month.
 
ViviTheMage said:
We don't really use DFS-R, We have a location with a VPN'd cable, and it's been working great, we're considering moving some of the smaller branches over..save the 600$~ or so a month.
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You should look in to it. One of the more impressive techs to pop out of MS's "skunkworks." I use DFS-R here to maintain nearly a terabyte of data. The way I have it set up, there is one dedicated "back up" server that is included as a partner in all replication sets. That system is backed up via the backup software. If someone edits a word doc out at Site Q, the edit is replicated back (changes only) to the central office and is dropped in to the backup server where it goes to tape at night.

Edit:

That backup server is basically Decent CPU + RAM and a Ton of disk space.
 
We currently have EOL Server 2000 servers at our branches, so we either have to upgrade those, or get this riverbed WAN tool. Money won't let us get both, so we've got to choose which is a better solution, that will last at least 3-4 years. In a perfect world, we'd have both servers/DFS-R and the WAN accelerators.
 
ViviTheMage said:
We currently have EOL Server 2000 servers at our branches, so we either have to upgrade those, or get this riverbed WAN tool. Money won't let us get both, so we've got to choose which is a better solution, that will last at least 3-4 years. In a perfect world, we'd have both servers/DFS-R and the WAN accelerators.
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Makes sense. Just as a side thought. On really tiny sites (5 people) I have had good luck tossing 2003 R2 on a small box like a Dell Optiplex 960 with 200 or 500gig drives in RAID 1. I am just trying to plug ideas out there for you and not making a recommendation long term. For those sites it is often worth buying an $800 machine + $400 OS license rather than a $5000 server.

Also as a side note, if you guys are looking at 2k8, get the trial and play with it. It takes getting used to.
 
If anything, we'd just get 2400 Dell tower servers with 4 drives, since our racks were a little short, and we like to keep all the servers the same.

We've got server 2008 running on 30 or so VM's, so we're well prepared for it, we can't upgrade AD until we get 2008 out to he branches, or remove the branch servers all together.

IMO, servers with 2008 is a good idea, but so is the WAN accelerator and centralizing everything. Our branches are within the 3 states, MN, WI, and IA...so it's not like data is traveling 1000 miles through the net. It sticks in our cloud with QWEST.

Anymore ideas you can think of...off to webex!
 
As for DFS, it can cause file coherency issues the last I checked. This is because it replicates on intervals and if someone modifies a file right after someone else the last change is saved and not what the first user changed. Performance wise Cisco and Riverbed will be very similar and you are better off looking at how they integrate in the network. If you are running a Cisco network and WAAS will integrate much more cleanly.
 
Yeah, but WAAS does not perform as well i've read. Riverbed integrates easily, not as easy as a slide in card like Cisco though.
 
In some cases Cisco is better than Riverbed and in some cases it is the other way around. Overall performance is pretty much the same with both.

When I said that Riverbed does not integrate as easily with the network it depends on what features you are running in the network. If you are using things like Netflow in a Cisco router Riverbed will break that with its default operation since it tunnels the traffic. Also, if you are doing any sort of QoS classification on the router (very common) that configuration will need to be duplicated on Riverbed again since it tunnels traffic by default. WAAS does not have this issue since its native operation is transparent to the network.
 
nightowl said:
As for DFS, it can cause file coherency issues the last I checked. This is because it replicates on intervals and if someone modifies a file right after someone else the last change is saved and not what the first user changed. Performance wise Cisco and Riverbed will be very similar and you are better off looking at how they integrate in the network. If you are running a Cisco network and WAAS will integrate much more cleanly.
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DFS-R replicates immediately (well within milliseconds in my tests.) Assuming it is not overloaded and it does not have a back log. Biggest "issue" is locks are not replicated which means if 2 people have the same file open on 2 different replicas and save the "last person in" wins. This is normal and happens even with locks. DFS-R actually detects that the file changes on both sides and will save both.

Also should this manage to happen, newest date wins which yes mimics what your commenting about. The conflict file is still saved however and can be recovered.
 
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