Saturday, March 1, 2008

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.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

You know, it would be really nice if you write a separate post about the different WAN Optimization solution, and the pros & cons of each product, especially that you seems to have experience with different vendors such as Bluecoat and Juniper.

Unknown said...

Good information - interesting that Blue Coat couldn't cache web pages. What was the nature of the http traffic that Blue Coat couldn't cache it.

Justin
Blue Coat vs Riverbed

Unknown said...

hey guys

it seems to me taht you didnt fine tune riverbed boxes
you have to run he pilot under the comstances fo riverbed
here is some diffirent point betwen riverbed and juniber
In addition to the hardware limitations of the Juniper WXC devices, the Juniper system also suffers from architectural issues that cause system-wide scaling difficulties. Specifically, Juniper uses a fragmented data store architecture, which stores a separate instance of data for communication through each tunnel. The result is a very inefficient use of storage in the data center core WXC device. As an example, where users at 10 different branch offices retrieve the same file from a central file server, the data center core WXC device must store data for the relevant file 10 separate times – once for each remote WXC device.