WAN Optimization Test - Blue Coat vs. Riverbed
Enterprises increasingly have distributed employee bases, remote offices, mobile workers, even as applications become increasingly consolidated and centralized. This creates networking challenges that are required to deliver acceptable user performance while contending with continually rising bandwidth costs. WAN Optimisation has become a requirement to enable this new world.
Applications and networks, however, are also changing. Enterprise applications have shifted to web technologies. HTML front ends over HTTP/SSL. Video is dominating traffic, over 52% of worldwide Internet traffic and increasingly important for enterprise training and communications. Cloud delivery is changing the structure of how traditional enterprise applications are deployed.
We at Broadband-Testing felt it was important to test not only the traditional WAN Optimisation use cases of file access, email and backup/DR optimisation, but also to test these critical emerging areas.
We tested two key vendors, Blue Coat and Riverbed, comparing the Blue Coat MACH5 SG600 and Riverbed Steelhead 1050. We used a WAN simulator from Shunra to induce 100 ms of latency, and leveraged applications and various third party test tools.
