Riverbed Cloud Networking lets enterprises simplify their network configuration and management and helps enterprises intuitively manage networks based on parameters relevant to their businesses such as applications, users, locations, performance, and security across LAN, wireless LAN, WAN, and cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms.

The Riverbed solution provides an intelligent and intuitive approach to designing, deploying, and managing distributed networks for the modern hybrid enterprise. The solution consists of appliances and a centralized management console that the administrator uses to view network health, deploy appliances, and make changes to policies. 

The Riverbed Cloud Networking offering includes the following components:

This deployment guide provides detailed examples of validated designs for each series of appliances.

SteelConnect Manager (SCM) is a web-based, management portal that lets you design the network before deploying any hardware. You can use SCM to push configurations to the devices for deployment of infrastructure without the need for an engineer to be on-site. After deployment, SCM provides network visibility for manageability and troubleshooting and SCM manages all appliances, including all firmware upgrades.

SCM is offered primarily as a cloud SaaS service, but it is also available as an on-premises solution.

The SCM cloud SaaS service resides in the global Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud public infrastructure and orchestrates a series of services hosted by Riverbed. Each service has dependencies that function as a part of the collective SteelConnect infrastructure.

SteelConnect appliances (gateways, switches, and access points) connect to core services, and the services associated with them, to find their assigned server. After an appliance is paired with SCM, it connects only to its corresponding SCM. Each SCM communicates through various services for updates regarding the appliance registration and management changes. All communication between the appliances and SCM, as well as all interoperating services inside of SCM, are authenticated through x509 certificate validation. These Riverbed-owned certificates are exchanged and validated for authenticity.

SteelConnect gateways are physical and virtual secure WAN gateways that provide unified connectivity (point-to-point and full-mesh) and enforcement of global policy across on-premises and cloud network environments, zero-touch provisioning, and secure automated VPN management.

Gateways are categorized into hardware and software appliances. The gateways automatically map into connected network segments, called zones, to:

The SteelConnect gateway comes in various form factors to accommodate a variety of network architectures and complexities:

Starting with SteelConnect version 2.11, SteelHead SD appliances and the SDI-2030 gateway run different software than the SDI-130, SDI-130W, SDI-330, SDI-1030, and virtual SDI gateway/cloud SDI gateways. While the two families of appliances are fully interoperable and can be deployed seamlessly on the same network to form SD-WAN overlays across multiple WANs, SteelHead SD appliances and the SDI-2030 gateway provide support for these additional features:

The following table captures the capabilities per SteelHead SD and SteelConnect model.