The causes for slow throughput in WANs are well known: high delay (round-trip time or latency), limited bandwidth, and chatty application protocols. Large enterprises spend a significant portion of their information technology budgets on storage and networks, much of it spent to compensate for slow throughput, by deploying redundant servers and storage, and the required backup equipment. SteelHeads enable you to consolidate and centralize key IT resources to save money, reduce capital expenditures, simplify key business processes, and improve productivity.

With the SteelHead, you can solve a range of problems affecting WANs and application performance, including:

SteelHead appliances intercept client-server connections without interfering with normal interactions, file semantics, or protocols. All client requests are passed through to the server normally, while relevant traffic is optimized to improve performance, using the techniques described in the following sections.

For detailed information about how the SteelHead works and deployment design principles, see the SteelHead Deployment Guide.