Steelhead appliances are designed for easy remote management.

Steelhead Appliance Management and Reporting

Steelhead appliances include a robust enterprise-class management infrastructure that simplifies configuration, enables control from around the world, and provides full visibility into the health and performance of your Steelhead appliances. In addition to the management console available on every Steelhead appliance, enterprises can take advantage of the optional Central Management Console (CMC)to enable centralized management of many Steelhead appliances at once.

Model Specifications

The 50 Series Appliances (xx50 Specs)

Model	INT 9350	CMC 8150	SMC 8650
Profile	3U	1U	1U
Optimized WAN Capacitya	12 Gbpsp	-	-
Optimized TCP Connectionsd	1,000,000	-	-
Raw Capacity	-	1 TB	1 TB
Data Store Capacity	-	-	-
RSP Partitionk	-	-	-
Storage Fault Tolerance	RAID	-	-
Front Swappable Disks	3g	2	2
RAMm	8 GB	6 GB	6 GB
Expansion Slots (PCI-e)h	4	-	-
Onboard Bypass ports (Copper)	4	-	-
Max # of Bypass Ports	20	-	-

^(a) Inbound (WAN to LAN) Steelhead capacity is unrestricted; outbound WAN capacity can be expected up to the amount listed. On the 5050, and 6050, total WAN capacity equals inbound traffic + outbound traffic
^(b) No enforced optimized WAN bandwidth limit
^(c) For Data Center to Data Center workloads, WAN capacity is up to 1 Gbps. For DC to remote office workloads, recommended WAN capacity is up to 622 Mbps
^(d) TCP Connections can be expected up to the amount listed
^(e) No PFS support
^(f) Data store uses fault tolerant striped configuration
^(g) Hot swappable disks
^(h) Optional Network Bypass cards: Dual and Quad LX and SX GigE Fiber GigE, Quad Copper GigE, Dual 10GbE SR (INT9350 & SHA7050 only)
^(k) Raw disk capacity allocated to the RSP partition. About 7GB is used by RSP package and filesystem. Partner packages need additional storage (based on the size of the package)
^(m) RSP requires additional 2GB of memory, 6050 requires 4GB, 7050 requires 8GB
⁽ⁿ⁾ Over 4Gbps of LAN performance with 2.5X data reduction when configured to use jumbo Ethernet frames
^(o) The 5050L and the 1050 B/W increases require RiOS 5.5.7 or 6.0.2
^(p) Multiple inpath interfaces were used to achieve this throughput

Management Features

Steelhead appliances can be managed through a rich GUI or command-line interface for fast set up, configuration, and remote management.

Extensive Reporting

Steelhead appliances monitor traffic and performance and provide reports on a per-port/application basis. Performance reports containing data for the previous 30 days are easily retrieved via simple-to-read graphs rendered in the Steelhead Web GUI and formatted tables in the CLI. Reports can be customized to show specific date ranges and can depict application metrics and data reduction statistics by connection and in total for the appliance.

Selectable Optimization via Powerful Rules Configuration

The default state for Steelhead appliances is to intercept and optimize all WAN traffic. However, a powerful capability to configure rules provides administrators the option to restrict or specify optimization by protocol, port, or IP address range.

QoS Configuration

QoS rule sets based on latency and bandwidth can be configured and sorted easily with either the WEB UI or CLI, ensuring high performance for real-time traffic like voice, video, Citrix or other interactive applications.

Over-the-Wire Upgrades

As new Steelhead appliance software updates are released, a facility to easily perform upgrades is provided via the CLI or WEB GUI. In addition, a roll-back mechanism allows an administrator to quickly revert back to the previous software image if desired.

Health Monitoring and Reporting via WEBGUI, SNMP traps, Syslog, and email Notification

Steelhead appliances constantly monitor key software and hardware areas and when thresholds have been met, alarms are sent to the WEB GUI, SNMP v.2 and v.3 MIB traps, Syslog, and by way of email notification. Key monitored areas include software, network bypass, data store, software version, CPU utilization, memory utilization, memory paging, admission control, high temperature, and disk full events.

AutoSupport for Reporting Problems to Riverbed Technical Support

Steelhead’s optional AutoSupport facility quickly reports problems back to Riverbed support when critical failures occur, enabling much faster time to problem resolution.

Multi-Level Access to Management System

The Steelhead appliances WEB GUI and CLI provide monitor (read-only) and admin (full control) access. Management system authentication may also be managed via Radius/TACACS+ enterprise infrastructures.

Pass-Through and Optimization Benefit Reporting

These detailed reports give insight to what WAN traffic is or isn’t being optimized, and quantifies into different categorizes. Very useful for measuring the performance improvements, reporting and analysis of activity on the WAN.

RSP Watchdog

The RSP watchdog monitors each active virtual machine and can detect failure with a heartbeat. If there’s a problem it can block all traffic sent to the service or route around it. The watchdog is configurable and includes a graceful restart if desired.

Centralized Management

If you have many Steelhead appliances, you can deploy a separate, optional Central Management Console (CMC) appliance, which allows you to configure and manage many Steelhead appliances simultaneously.