WAN optimization is an important part of the enterprise network strategy. With the increasing move to enterprise and cloud services, applications are being migrated to data centers or the Cloud, which moves them farther away from users. The need for access by remote and mobile users also drives the increasing need to prevent the WAN from being a performance bottleneck.

The SteelHead provides WAN optimization at OSI Layers 1, 4, and 7 to perform three major functions: perform data, transport, and application streamlining. RiOS combines data reduction and compression to perform data streamlining, reducing bandwidth. Transport and application streamlining minimize protocol and application communication redundancy by reducing packet round trips.

The SteelHead WAN optimization solution can also be configured to provide path optimization and Quality of Service (QoS). An organization can optimize some or the entire available network communications path, depending on the architecture implemented. Organizations can assign each optimized application a QoS class and can granularly assign each application class to a path. This configuration can be leveraged to create primary and secondary paths to each application based on the priority or other characteristics of the traffic. This path selection system also ensures bandwidth failover of the primary communications pathway.