Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile software enable wide-area data services (WDS) for enterprises of all sizes. These products make it easy for organizations to accelerate the applications that are most important to their users, anywhere in the world. Steelhead appliances are available in a range of sizes to meet the needs of any remote office - from small sales offices with just a few people, to major design centres and corporate facilities with thousands of employees. Steelhead Mobile software enables workers on the move to enjoy LAN-like access to files and applications whether they are working from home, on the road, or even at customer sites.

Every Steelhead product comes with the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS):

• Data Streamlining optimizes all WAN traffic by removing all redundant data and prioritizing traffic through advanced QoS mechanisms
• Transport Streamlining improves the behaviour of TCP
• Application Streamlining reduces application protocol inefficiencies and enables disconnected operations
• Management Streamlining simplifies the deployment, maintenance, and management of the appliances.

The complete Steelhead product family optimizes traffic in both directions, transparent to your applications, and requires no reconfiguration to client and server software. All Steelhead products are designed for easy integration into your existing network, with no changes to routers or servers, and complete compatibility with existing QoS and VoIP implementations.

Riverbed has architected its products to provide the best possible acceleration for the broadest range of enterprise applications. This means that employees across your organization can see dramatic, immediate benefits from the Steelhead product family. The Steelhead family is built on an application-independent architecture that optimizes all TCP traffic for bandwidth utilization and TCP behaviour. On top of this architecture, Riverbed has built a series of Application Streamlining modules that further optimize applications like Windows, Exchange, HTTP, HTTPS, NFS, and MS SQL.