My view on Riverbed’s SD-WAN Solution

One of the companies that we visited for Network Field Day 22 (NFD22) was Riverbed. Fortunately, Riverbed is not a new company for me as I have used some of their products in the past. For NFD22, their SD-WAN solution was front and center. This is a product that I have had experience with but it was back in 2018/2019. This made me eager for my visit to learn the advances they have been doing.

Back in late 2018, the company I was at decided to rollout Riverbed’s SD-WAN solution. At the time, there were a lot of promises. This included having a cloud management solution, the ability to accelerate application traffic, and the ability to utilize Azure WAN to connect over global distances better. Unfortunately, our experiences were not exactly what was promised. Their cloud management solution did work well. They host the management platform and we were able to deploy their appliances using templates built within the console. However, we sometimes ran into minor issues when deploying appliances. To be honest, it was not always the solutions fault but since Riverbed sold us the solution as easy to use, I cannot really take all the blame when things failed. Regarding application acceleration, some did feel faster but, at the time, we did not have a lot of traffic going over the connections. Unfortunately, the sites we used for testing were relatively new so we did not have a good comparison against old connectivity (i.e. MPLS) at those sites. Once they were deployed, we had no problems getting Riverbed appliances to build connections between each other. Unfortunately, Azure WAN did not work as well. Based on my understanding of what was happening, I would blame Microsoft for this failure, which was primarily due to it being a new service. However, we were told by Riverbed that it should not have any problems, which is not what happened at that time.

Now, my experience with Riverbed was far from a failure. I would say they have a good product but there were some issues when compared to what my company was sold. My personal opinion is that Riverbed has good WAN solution but not a great one. Part of their offering is to use best-of-breed solutions when it comes to concepts like web security. For instance, if you are already using a product like Zscaler’s web security then adding on the Riverbed SD-WAN would work really well. In this case, switching to an all-encompassing solution would be more work. Unfortunately for Riverbed, they are not the only ones doing this. Now, I am not going to mention their competitors here but you should not have any problems finding them.

I mentioned I was eager to visit Riverbed. Since I did not have a great experience when my company deployed it, I figured Riverbed had worked on these issues and would be giving a presentation on how it works today. Unfortunately, that is not what happened. Most of their presentation felt a lot like the sales pitch my company was given back in late 2018. So, I have to assume that there is not much of a change in the deployment issues. But if you are patient this should not be an issue.

There was one item that did get my attention. Vincent Berk (Chief Architect for Security at Riverbed) gave a presentation that described visibility into the network including when problems occur. This was something we did not have when we deployed the solution and it looked like something that would have helped us. Their NPM product (Network Performance Monitoring) gives the admin a visibility into how the network, including the hardware components, is working and it does this continuously. Check out the video linked below to hear more about it. This makes me think that their development is making the products better.

I may not be the only one with the same experience of the Riverbed WAN solution but my experience should not mean to exclude them from your list of solutions. Their solution offers a secure connection between sites which is the key factor for SD-WAN connectivity. I cannot say if the Azure WAN connection works now since my company never really got it to work while I was there and there was no real mention of it during the presentations. Their management console was well thought out. By adding on the NPM product, it looks to be an even better solution. Riverbed definitely seems like a company that is forward thinking and still coming up with new ideas and products. If you are already using web security solutions like Zscaler, then a Riverbed SD-WAN should be on your list of possible products.