Steelhead Mobile has been ported to versions of Microsoft Windows as well as the Mac. The software runs as a task on a notebook to store frequently used data and interact with other Steelhead appliances run on virtual machines or by cloud service providers and data centres.
Raper says small offices as well as mobile users don’t lose out on performance when using the software version instead of dedicated hardware.
“We feel that about five users in a remote site should get at least 90 percent of the benefit by running [Steelhead] on their laptop or desktop versus having an appliance.”
The mobile client demonstrates its return on value by showing how much data would have been sent on the WAN versus what was sent, and the percentage saving in cost. Raper says the lower data consumption is less important than the user experience, which is largely subjective. “Can I use my CRM or email and have the same experience as on a local network? That’s the metric that matters,” he says.
WAN acceleration makes more sense than the conventional workaround for slow VPN connections – downloading a file to the local hard drive on a laptop, making changes to the file, and then loading it back up again.
Raper says this workaround results in staff moving large amounts of data over the network to make small changes.
Instead of downloading and uploading the whole file, an employee using WAN acceleration could make the changes and save the document while it was sitting on the original server.
The workaround also runs the risk of creating multiple versions in several places if two people download a file at the same time.
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