About SteelHead
The causes for slow throughput in WANs are well known: limited bandwidth, and chatty application protocols, high round-trip time or latency. 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. SteelHead 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:
• insufficient WAN bandwidth.
• inefficient transport protocols in high-latency environments.
• inefficient application protocols in high-latency environments.
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.