Military customers around the world, from navies to special forces groups, are using Riverbed WDS to enhance communications and improve operational efficiency. With WDS, military customers can consolidate their IT assets, optimize bandwidth usage, and improve disaster recovery processes – enabling them to cut costs and increase data security.

With Riverbed Steelhead products, military customers can also accelerate applications to remote locations to give warfighters timely access to mission-critical information. For example, one of the largest navies in the world wanted to simplify communication between ships and their terrestrial-based support facilities for IP-based voice, video, and data collaboration. This Naval fleet used high-latency, low-bandwidth radio-frequency satellite links between its support facilities and its ships all over the world.

Using Riverbed Steelhead appliances, this Naval customer was able to achieve "near-terrestrial" performance of its key Web applications on all of its ships. At the same time, bandwidth utilization was reduced by nearly 70%, freeing up bandwidth for real time voice and video.

Accelerating military satellite WANs: SCPS interoperability

For military customers that depend on satellite WANs, Riverbed has partnered with Global Protocols, Inc. to integrate SkipWare®, the market-leading SCPS implementation, into Steelhead appliances.  The Space Communication Protocol Standards-Transport Protocol (SCPS – TP) is a TCP variant intended for high-delay, high-loss environments. It is specified as a standard for most tactical satellite programs in the US DoD and is the standard in DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) service provision facilities.

With Riverbed and SkipWare together, military customers can get the best of both worlds: the market leading acceleration capabilities of Steelhead appliances alongside best-of-breed SCPS functionality from SkipWare.  Military customers deploying the combined solution can now achieve greater application performance benefits across their satellite WAN while maintaining SCPS interoperability.  The combined solution enables military organizations to optimize connectivity with any SkipWare-based military network and maintain full interoperability with any other SCPS-based network.

Riverbed WDS: meeting the diverse needs of military customers

For military organizations wishing to accelerate mission-critical traffic across diverse network environments, Riverbed WDS is the logical choice, offering the best performance across the broadest range of applications. Military customers around the globe have deployed Steelhead products, ranging from small deployments to multi-site deployments with hundreds of appliances. These organizations have chosen Riverbed products to enable consolidation of global IT assets, speed data transfer for mobile field operations units, decrease backup and data replication times by up to 90 percent, and reduce bandwidth costs and utilization.