Dophiのブログ

      In the end of July, a new xx50 series of Riverbed Steelhead Appliance is announced and it will be available to ship by mid-August. There are four major models with flexible licensing and the optimizing capacity depends on it. This gives the customer investment protection and the ability to have the solution grow with their business. The table below is the official specification sheet from Riverbed.

      As we can read from this table, the optimized TCP connections of Steelhead 250 with Low (L) and Medium (M) are more than Steelhead 100 and 200 (The list prices are the same). This let me consider the Steelhead 250 can replace Steelhead 100 and 200 even though the prices of these models are basically not fit to a small business company. Steelhead 550 series is not suitable in current market in Taiwan, but it with a High (H) license might be a consideration when we have a price issue for a case. Steelhead 1050 is a good choice to replace 1520 no matter we purchase L or M license. This model let us have not only more flexible optimization TCP connections than 1020 and 1520 but also WAN capacity. 2050 with M license is a good choice to replace 3020 as well.

      Except this hardware specification difference, new Steelhead xx50 series have some new features as below. These features provide a cost-down solution in a dual in-path implementation and disaster recovery of hard disks and power. In addition, the 1050 and 2050 support 8 bypass ports that can intercept 4 circuits. There are 4 onboard ports, and one PCI-e expansion slot that can be configured with one of the option cards- 2 port fiber, 4 port fiber or 4 port copper. Be aware, the old PCI-X cards can't be used on those new platforms and the minimum RiOS versions required are 4.1.6 and 5.0.3.

New Features:

• 4 On-board copper ports on 1Us
• RAID-10 on the 1U models (2050s)
• Hot swap hard drives on the 1Us
• Hot swap power supplies on the 1Us