My company had a couple of licensed Riverbed Steelhead WAN accelerators sitting around, I thought I would hook them up in a lab and see how they work. The idea was that we could use these at our remote SATCOM sites to reduce bandwidth and latency. The right hand side in the diagram indicates the remote site. The remote switch re-directs all client traffic to the client Steelhead. Once peered the client Steelhead pipes all that traffic to any peered server Steelhead, which in this case is an out-of-path device. I chose this architecture because it would allow me to implement the Steelheads with minimal impact to the existing network.
After I beat my head on the wall for a week, I realized I had an old ACL blocking the Steelhead traffic. I deleted it and immediately the Steelheads peered.
Then my boss poked his head in and “operations” took immediate precedence over “projects.”
Next steps on this lab will include baselining the network with and without the Steelheads, and comparing!