We are doing WAN accelerator evals. I’ve been drinking the Cisco kool-aid for a long time now, so my natural inclination is to go with WAAS, sort of by default. But the more reading I do, the more it seems that the Riverbed Steelhead is a superior product. Reportedly, WAAS is difficult to install and tweak when compared to Steelhead. In addition, Riverbed offers a mobile client that Cisco does not. WAAS is available on a NAM, which is sort of interesting for our 3800s, but not a huge deal. We’re okay using WCCP and/or in-line deployments in appropriate situations.
Any of you dealing with WAAS and/or Steelhead care to comment on the capabilities and ease-of-deployment for the appliances? In my world, we’re looking to accelerate a variety of WAN links ranging from T1 to OC-3, focusing on CIFS, HTTP, MAPI, and other TCP-based applications such as FTP. SRDF is also of interest, but we’ll be migrating off of SRDF to something else in a year or so. Pre-staging of data is interesting, but not a huge concern.
Feel free to comment here in the blog or unicast me…