WAN Optimization - Application Delivery Products
Gold Award:
Riverbed Steelhead
Leading the pack in our WAN Optimization/Application Delivery category this year was Steelhead from Riverbed. First introduced almost five years ago, Steelhead quickly became a reader favorite.
Last year's silver award winner, Steelhead kicked it up a notch and snagged the gold in 2009, continuing to impress readers with net WAN throughput enhancement and transfer time improvement.
Riverbed's win also reflected network managers' growing attention to application latency: 78% of readers gave Steelhead four or five stars on a five-star scale for its ability to mitigate network latency, with 25% giving it the highest rating for application-specific support.
One customer found that his SAP benchmarks dropped from 18 seconds to load to just six seconds after installing Steelhead, and the company estimated annual savings of more than $100,000 in bandwidth costs.
Respondents to our awards survey said Riverbed made a "tremendous positive impact" on WAN performance and hailed what they called "the best application-specific support." One reader put it succinctly: "[Steelhead is] good at what it does and sets the pace for the WAN acceleration market."