The HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform addresses the challenges associated with backhauling cloud-destined traffic to the data center, thereby reducing the cost of bandwidth connectivity from the data center to cloud providers.
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Riverbed SteelHead
Score 8.1 out of 10
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San Francisco based Riverbed Technology offers Steelhead, a WAN optimization solution. The new SteelHead 90 series appliances are designed to provide performance, security, scalability, data movement efficiency, and resilient networking.
Have remote sites and need them to feel local? Want to get all your locations virtually on the same network? This is the way. And if you're like us and need an easy way to manage all your remote locations in one place this is the tool you want to use.
Riverbed Steelhead is very stable and integrates into applications easily, especially Microsoft and Azure or AWS. If there is a new Windows version available, the Riverbed version is not far away. The remote locations can work like they are located near the data center. For this reason, you can reduce your global data centers to a minimum. Some customers have just one!
Often there are alarms that are false positives due to bugs in the code - these are usually rectified in the next patch but that seems to be a common occurrence with updates
Can only have 7 "BIOs" - which are effectively policies that you use to choose how traffic is handled in terms of routing and QoS
Devices throughput is capped by Aruba licensing meaning that's an additional concern you'll have to monitor and take into consideration when choosing ISPs.
Alerts sometimes don't tell you things you'd like to know (like when a site is nearing its bandwidth cap)
The product and its management as a whole are worth investigating for any kind of people interested in looking at new SD-WAN appliances. The devices possess a lot of capability for granularity which makes them much more advanced than other products I've worked with in the past. Ironically, for all the granularity though, this product is held back that you can ultimately only have 7 different policies for routing decisions. We've ran into instances where we wanted two sites to only share certain routes between each other (through the use of tags which are basically an arbitrary way to say this traffic is special) but then we had to collapse some of our routing decisions in order to make a specific route table for these two to be able which felt like a step back in the advanced routing decisions we had previously made
Prisma SD-WAN is a very simple solution to configure and maintain (so much to the point that in that environment, I questioned if my skills as a Network Engineer were needed). However it worked almost primarily on its own with very little input, by default and at the time of review had no way to do fully mesh (which was desired), and constantly suffered from memory leak. Its integrations were through the use of obscure tags and suffered from a "when it works - it works but when it doesn't - it doesn't and you don't know why" mentality. In contrast, HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN gives you a lot of insight into what is going on with the site, the integrations are done easily within Orchestrator (the control plane), and ultimately the product is typically a very stable product with many ways to configure and tweak the solution to fit your business needs.
