Most WAN optimisation and QoS solutions tackle poor performance at the network level only, or look to address issues with one specific application. As a result, they yield barely 10% or 15% improvement in application performance and bandwidth utilisation.

In contrast, Riverbed's integrated WDS solution simultaneously addresses performance issues at the network, storage and application levels. It also tackles bandwidth constraints, TCP 'chattiness' (a particular problem on high latency networks), and the inherent inefficiencies of key applications themselves that were originally designed to operate in a LAN environment.

The Riverbed Optimisation System (RiOS), is an integrated solution for accelerating applications over the WAN. It automatically optimises all applications that run over TCP along with specific applications such as databases, file sharing, email, and web applications (including HTTPS).

Typical speed improvements - in 'number of times' - in applications running across the WAN are shown below:

Riverbed removes repetitive traffic from the WAN via its unique Data Streamlining algorithms. Data Streamlining stores WAN traffic on disk in a proprietary, application-independent form that can be reused by any application, any file or any user that sends or receives the same data.

Whether a client requests a file that has been renamed, emails an attachment or uses another application like FTP or a Web-based application, any traffic that has previously travelled across the network will not be retransmitted. Instead, only a small reference to the data is sent to the Riverbed Steelhead appliance on the opposite side of the network. Riverbed's references are 16 bytes in length, yet can represent megabytes of data, which results in high levels of WAN bandwidth optimization.

The result is a typical reduction of between 60% and 95% of the data running across the WAN and the radical acceleration of applications, making them run in some cases up to 100 times faster.