Comparing WAN Accelleration Products (Juniper WXC vs Riverbed vs Bluecoat)

Hey All,

For some weeks now i am busy with a project that includes Juniper Firewalls (with VPN's), Bluecoat (WAN ACC), Juniper WXC (WAN ACC), Juniper NSM (Management station), Juniper CMS (WAN Management station).

The Firewall/VPN part was difficult, because at HQ they had 2 ISP, but also at the remote side they had 2 ISP. The customer asked full redundancy (so we needed to create 4 VPN tunnel from remote to HQ). This i did before so wasn't to hard! (just play around with Vrouters and everything is up and running).

The real hard part was which WAN Accellerator will they take! So the customer start testing together with me.

Products we tested:

Bluecoat
Juniper WXC
Riverbed

We provider the tests for Bluecoat and Juniper, After these test we saw that on a satelite link bluecoat wasn't doing well (especially when using http!)

Personal i had the feeling that bluecoats proxy kicked in here and didn't do alot of WAN Accell. We also called bluecoat and they came over to do some tweaking, and saw that the customer his webpages wheren't cacheable (and this is the reason it didn't work that well)

After the bluecoat test, they tested Riverbed (which wasn't that bad, and better then Bluecoat).
The last test we came again with Juniper WXC and it seems that this was the fastes solution.

So because of the outstanding Juniper FW/VPN concept (vrouter and routing based vpn's) and the good performance of Juniper WXC, the customer choosed us to build there international Network.