MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World

Training in San Francisco (part 1)

Posted on 2008-10-31 07:00:00
Tags: Travelling, San Francisco, Riverbed, Steelhead

In the next two weeks I will be on training for my new job at Riverbed in San Francisco and Sunnyvale. It will be two courses, Steelhead Appliance Deployment and Management and Steelhead Mobile Client Installation and Configuration.

A Steelhead Appliance is a device in your network, one centrally at your servers and one or more remotely on the user LANs, which provides WAN optimisation, WAN acceleration and Wide Area File Services. Or in plain English: It makes the data over your networks be transferred faster.

The best comparison for it is your webbrowser: When you initially a page with images, it will download them all from the webserver and store them in a local cache. If the next page you go to refers to these images, it will just use them from the cache instead of downloading them again. That is Wide Area File Services.

The next one, WAN optimisation, is the HTTP protocol. The old version setup a new TCP session for every HTTP request, the new version can continue on an earlier used TCP session.

And the last one, WAN acceleration, is compression of the static HTML pages by the webserver: Compressed data is often smaller, so it will be there faster.

The Steelhead appliances don't only work on the HTTP protocol, but also (including but not limited to) with CIFS (Windows File Sharing), MAPI (Exchange server), NFS. And for protocols it doesn't know about, it will still do compression.

That is the hardware version, which works on your WAN/LAN infrastructure. There is also the version called Steelhead Mobile for on notebooks computers, it will give you, at home over a VPN for example, the same performance boost as you have on your LAN at work.

Like I said, the first week is training, the next week is for getting my troubleshooting experience. From what I've read up so far it is pretty technical stuff I will get trained with, so it can't be all bad :-)

If you are in San Francisco between 2 November and 9 November or in Sunnyvale between 9 November and 14 November and want to meet up, drop me an email!

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