About the SteelHead Mobile Solution

Business performance depends on application performance. When applications do not perform, employees cannot work efficiently, and productivity quickly decreases. This effect is especially true for the mobile workforce as they consume applications from home, coffee shops, airports, client sites, and anywhere around the world.

The challenges of always-changing network latency and bandwidth conditions can be unpredictable and hard for IT teams to resolve. Slowdowns can lead to missed business opportunities, which, when considered at scale, can come at a great cost to any enterprise.

To stay competitive, build strong and lasting customer and client relationships, increase pipeline and revenue streams, take new products to market on time, and execute high-risk, time-sensitive missions, your mobile workforce must be able to collaborate and share in real time, download files quickly, and send large file attachments rapidly to any destination. Your workforce needs fast access to corporate documents and information anywhere they are working in the world. Your organization should have the freedom to decide the optimal location where data and applications reside: locally, in branch offices and global data centers, and in the cloud.

Riverbed’s SteelHead Mobile solution delivers application acceleration to mobile workers. Extending the functionality of our WAN acceleration and application acceleration services and solutions, the SteelHead Mobile solution provides mobile employees with fast and reliable access to SaaS and on-premises applications. With a lightweight software package installed transparently on laptops or desktops, the SteelHead Mobile solution allows your mobile workforce to be highly efficient and productive anywhere.

In most cases, the SteelHead Mobile service requires only the hostname and IP address of the SteelHead Mobile (the controller) to be operational.

SteelHead Mobile was formerly called Client Accelerator, and SteelHead Mobile Controller was formerly called Client Accelerator Controller.

For details about features and supported platforms, go to the SteelHead Mobile datasheet.

For details about product specifications, go to the product family specification sheet.

Here are some of the key features of the SteelHead Mobile solution:

• Improves application performance—Application acceleration for branch offices and mobile workers. Includes URL learning, page parsing, embedded-object prefetching, and metadata acceleration capabilities.

• Accelerates web applications—On-premises and SaaS applications, intranet portals, document management systems, ERM and CRM solutions.

• Provides visibility and control—Logical groups, policy control, aggregated and individual reporting. Offers native visibility that includes endpoint health checks and an alarm library.

Depending on your organization, your SteelHead Mobile solution can include:

• SteelHead Mobile Controller—Manages licenses and controls the deployment, management, and reporting of SteelHead Mobile service instances. As a virtual appliance, the controller can be installed anywhere in your network or in the cloud where it is accessible to client service instances.

• SteelHead Mobile software—Runs as a service on endpoint devices. Enables LAN-like performance, no matter where users are located. SteelHead Mobile software is managed by the controller and connects to a SteelHead.

The SteelHead Mobile Controller, typically located in the data center, is required for deployment, management, and licensing control of SteelHead Mobile software. After the controller is deployed, packages that contain client software can be distributed to endpoint devices.

The controller is a powerful management tool that includes these capabilities:

• Group assignments—Manage client software in groups. Push policies, install updates, and manage security for any number of endpoints that have the same resource requirements.

• Enterprise scalability—Cluster controllers to scale beyond the capacity of an individual controller. Configure high-availability topologies for maximum uptime.

• Web-based management—Manage controllers from anywhere through the web-based Management Console. While a full set of CLI commands is also available, we recommend you use the Management Console. Read about command-line features in the Riverbed Command-Line Interface Reference Manual.

• HTTPS/TLS Agent—Install a free license that enables the controller to operate in HTTPS/TLS Agent mode. Simplify the exchange and authentication of the TLS certificates needed for acceleration of TLS traffic between endpoints and the controller and the SteelHeads.

For improved security, the controller will stop accelerating with endpoint devices that have been disconnected from the network for more than one month.

You use packages to install and update the SteelHead Mobile software on each endpoint. A package is an installation bundle specific to the endpoint’s operating system that contains the SteelHead Mobile software and the information necessary for the service to communicate with the controller. Using packages and group assignments together, you can set the installation and connection details for all endpoints with identical needs just once, and then install the package to all endpoints in the assigned group with a single push.

SteelHead Mobile can be deployed either in standalone mode or as a Unified Agent module. To learn about deploying SteelHead Mobile as a Unified Agent module, go to Knowledge Base article S38756.

In most cases, you can deploy the default package included with the controller. For details, see About Packages.

SteelHead Mobile can be deployed either in standalone mode or as a Unified Agent module. To learn about deploying SteelHead Mobile as a Unified Agent module, go to Knowledge Base article S38756.

Group assignments govern which policies and packages your SteelHead Mobile endpoints receive. Group assignments enable you to deploy different policies to groups of endpoints, based on their individual performance needs. When you deploy a package to a group, the controller uses the group assignment to identify the proper subset of SteelHead Mobile endpoints and automatically provides policy and software updates to them.

For details, see Managing assignments.

A policy is a set of acceleration, security, endpoint storage, and other configuration settings for a group assignment (endpoints that have the same requirements). Policies can also be shared by controllers that are cluster members. A policy can be for a specific endpoint, or it can represent settings for groups of endpoints.

A policy is required for acceleration to occur.

The SteelHead Mobile Controller comes with a default policy, Initial. For basic settings, you can install and deploy the software without modifying the default policy.

For details, see About Policies.

Clusters are groups of two or more controllers used to pool available endpoint licenses and share configurations when multiple controllers are needed to support large deployments. Endpoints associated with clusters have access to the licenses on all controllers in the cluster, even if one or more of the controllers is unavailable or has used all of its licenses. Endpoints can connect to any controller in the cluster and receive shared configuration settings. Any cluster member can modify settings used by the cluster, and the settings are then automatically updated to the entire cluster.

For details, see About Controller Clusters.

Reports and logs provide a high-level view into network activity and let you drill down to specific endpoints, users, alarms, status, and so on.

The controller receives bandwidth and connection metrics from currently connected SteelHead Mobile endpoints every five minutes, and aggregates statistical data by hour and day. The controller stores this data for three months or longer, depending on your network environment.

If the controller is part of a cluster and you set aggregated statistics, the endpoint reports display time-series data aggregated across the entire cluster. If the controller is part of a cluster and you do not set aggregated statistics, the report only shows data from the current controller.

Reports are available for these items:

Logs are available for current and continuous monitoring, and for historical review. Logs can be filtered, allowing you to focus on specific items. User logs are filtered system logs, showing just user-related information. You can download logs.

About Reports and Logs.

You can scale the solution to the size your organization requires by clustering controllers. The SteelHead Mobile software can be deployed to any number of endpoints.

About Controller Clusters.

Manage your SteelHead Mobile Controllers from anywhere on your network. You can configure local role-based accounts or integrate with a variety of security protocols. Users with administrator privileges can configure and administer the controller. Users with monitor privileges can view reports and user logs, and change their own password. Controllers use self-signed certificates to provide encrypted web connections to the Management Console.

For details, see About the Management Console.

Exchange and authenticate TLS certificates automatically between endpoint devices and controllers and SteelHeads. Simplifying certificate-related processes enables you to seamlessly accelerate HTTPS/TLS traffic across your network. By simply adding a free license to your controller, you can enable the controller to operate in HTTPS/TLS simplification mode. In this mode, a single policy is assigned to the default, Group, and Active Directory Path assignments and pushed to service instances.

If no other licenses are applied to the controller or paid licenses have expired, acceleration services for all other protocols and policy configuration are not available. Only the Endpoint Settings > Controller Settings in the policy can be modified.

SteelHead Mobile supports full acceleration of TLS 1.3 connections, and all SSL connections will use TLS 1.3 by default. TLS 1.3 acceleration requires private key signing using a probabilistic signature scheme (PSS).

The SteelHead Mobile software is designed to be deployed to endpoint devices on your network without additional end-user configuration and runs as a service. The SteelHead Mobile Controller ships with a default policy, Initial, that provides default values for the service. The default policy is designed to be suitable for most network environments. In most cases, you can install and deploy the client software on endpoints without modifying the default policy. You can create your own packages and policies as needed.

A package created on a SteelHead Mobile Controller contains complete endpoint settings, including the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the controller and a certificate that secures communication between the client and the controller.

When you start the client service, it accesses the specified controller to obtain a license and a policy. After the endpoint retrieves a license and a policy from the controller, traffic can be accelerated between the client service and the server-side SteelHead. The client service performs data acceleration using the same mechanisms as a client-side SteelHead, and it maintains a connection with the controller to download new policies and software upgrades. This connection also enables the controller to monitor your endpoints and to upload logs from them.

Running in HTTPS/TLS Simplification mode, the service can facilitate the seamless exchange and authentication of the TLS certificates required for acceleration of HTTPS/TLS traffic. See About HTTP/TLS simplification.

When installing SteelHead Mobile (formerly Client Accelerator) 6.3.0 or later on endpoints with macOS 11 or later, you’ll need to allow a system extension from the SteelheadMobile.app to load and authorization for the SteelHead Mobile to filter and monitor traffic. For information on options for mass deployment of these settings or for manually allowing the extension on individual clients, see Reference: SteelHead Mobile Endpoint System Extensions.

First, you need to decide on a deployment topology. Do you need clusters? Is high-availability desirable? Do you want endpoints to share among a pool of licenses?

Next, you’ll want to think about the endpoint devices you need to support. What operating systems will be running on those endpoints? Do all endpoints have the same acceleration needs, or will you need to break them out into different groups with similar needs?

After you’ve installed your controllers and mapped out endpoint needs, it’s time to log in to the Management Console to license and configure your controllers. You might want to create group assignments and policies for those groups too.