Riverbed® Steelhead® RiOS® Application Installation and Getting Started Guide 2010-10

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Overview
Accelerating WAN Connections
As Figure 1-1 shows, the Extended Services zl Module with Steelhead
Application is typically deployed at a branch office. This application
communicates with a Steelhead appliance that is installed at the corporate
main office. The two work together to accelerate WAN traffic exchanged
between the branch and main offices.
The Steelhead appliance and the Extended Services zl Module with Steelhead
application communicate over a private WAN or virtual private network
(VPN). Because optimization between the two typically takes place over a
secure WAN, it is not necessary to configure company firewalls to support
Steelhead-specific ports.
Figure 1-1. Typical In-Path Deployment
Discovery of Remote Appliances
Riverbed provides management streamlining to simplify the deployment and
management of the Steelhead Application at the branch office:
■ Auto-Discovery Process—Auto-discovery enables the Steelhead appli-
ance at the main offices to automatically find remote Steelhead applica-
tions and to then optimize traffic using them. Auto-discovery relieves you
from having to manually configure large amounts of network information.
The auto-discovery process allows you to control and secure connections,
specify which traffic is to be optimized, and specify peers for optimization.
■ Auto—If the receiving Steelhead appliance is not using auto-discovery,
this has the same effect as the Accept peering rule action. If the enhanced
auto-discovery is enabled, the Steelhead appliance becomes the optimi-
zation peer only if it is the last Steelhead appliance in the path to the server.