About data streamlining

SteelHeads and Client Accelerator can reduce WAN bandwidth utilization by 65% to 98% for TCP-based applications using data streamlining. In addition to traditional techniques like data compression, Riverbed acceleration products employ a proprietary algorithm called scalable data referencing (SDR). SDR breaks up TCP data streams into unique data chunks that are stored in the appliance’s data store. Each data chunk is assigned a unique integer label, or reference, before it’s sent to peer appliances across the WAN. When the same byte sequence is seen again in future transmissions from clients or servers, the reference is sent instead of the raw data chunk, massively reducing the amount of data that needs to be transmitted. One small reference can refer to megabytes of data. The peer appliance uses this reference to find the original data chunk on its data store, and then reconstructs the original data stream.