You can avoid the penalties of a cold transfer by using Common Internet File System (CIFS) and HTTP prepopulation to warm the SteelHead with data not yet requested by end users. Prepopulation is fully integrated into RiOS v7.0 or later.

The prepopulation of data is extremely beneficial for end users who know of data crossing the WAN: for example, operating system patch updates, antivirus update files, a video training session posted on an internal file server for offline viewing, or a directory of a user share located at the data center.

You configure prepopulation only on the client-side SteelHead. You must configure and connect the client-side SteelHead primary interface properly for prepopulation to work. The primary interface must be able to establish connection with the server.

The primary interface of the SteelHead acts as a client and requests data from the share you want to use to warm the RiOS data store. To warm both SteelHeads, data flows from the server, passes the server-side SteelHead, and ends at the client SteelHead.

The traffic leaves the primary interface and it must traverse a client-side in-path connection (for example, LAN0_0/WAN0_0 for an inline deployment, or WAN0_0 for a logical in-path deployment) before reaching the server-side SteelHead. Prepopulation does not work if the primary interface bypasses client-side optimization first.

This chapter includes the following sections: