Riverbed's Steelhead appliances provide the highest level of WAN performance across the broadest range of applications. Available in a wide range of sizes – all powered by the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) – Steelhead appliances are also the most scalable approach to application acceleration across your WAN.

Steelhead appliances come in a range of sizes to ensure that each of your offices has a properly sized acceleration appliance. Plus, with our upgradeable licensing capability, you don’t need to oversize a box for your remote offices and can ensure that you still have room to grow while protecting your WAN optimization investment.

Our smallest Steelhead appliance 100 is meant for offices with just a few people; our 6000-series appliances carry enterprise-class data center workloads and can meet the needs of offices with many thousands of users.

Small Office Models
With Riverbed's smaller models, you can now provide even your smallest remote offices with the application acceleration benefits that every office deserves.

These Steelhead appliances cost-effectively accelerate offices with just a handful of people. The smallest Steelhead 250-H supports up to about 25 people. A little larger than a DSL modem

These appliances are designed with a small, quiet form factor so that they can run on a desk and also come with rack mountable ears as well for a dedicated server rack or data center. They contain all the key optimization technologies within RiOS, thereby providing significant bandwidth reduction and application acceleration simultaneously.
In order to accommodate future growth, the Steelhead appliances are also software-upgradeable.

Mid-Size Office Models
For mid-size offices and regional data centers, Riverbed offers a powerful mid-range line of appliances. These models support an estimated 75 to 850 employees (depending on the device and usage characteristics), and scale up to 45 Mbps of WAN capacity. The mid-range Steelhead appliances also offer features that most competitors only offer in their high-end devices such as RAID and redundant power supplies.

With a convenient 1U server format, these models can easily be rack-mounted or kept in a server closet. Four (4) on-board copper Gigabit ethernet ports come standard in the 50 Series mid-range appliances with optional multi-port Ethernet and fiber cards available.

In order to accommodate future growth, the Steelhead appliances are also software-upgradeable to the grow with your business and protect your investment in Riverbed WAN optimization.

Large Office / Data Center Models
For your largest offices, corporate headquarters, or your data centers, the Steelhead Larger models provide even greater capacity, plus the redundancy required in a mission-critical technology.

Optional multi-port Ethernet cards enable integration into multi-link or redundant WAN configurations. Clustering with the Interceptor appliance provides additional failover or scaling in extremely large deployments, ensuring that Steelhead appliances can always scale up to meet your application acceleration needs.

These devices contain RAID, triple power supplies, and hot-swappable disk to ensure maximum uptime and rock-solid hardware reliability.