Steelhead and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN each offer unique strengths for tech buyers. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN seems to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive feature set and robust performance.
Features: Steelhead offers effective WAN optimization, ease of use, and competitive pricing and support options. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN provides comprehensive security features, robust network management capabilities, and advanced functionalities that users find worth the investment.
Room for Improvement: Steelhead could improve scalability, reporting features, and enhance user feedback mechanisms. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN needs more intuitive management tools, simplified system configurations, and better user guidance to address the complexity of the system.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Steelhead users report straightforward deployment processes but mixed reviews about customer service. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is considered complex to deploy due to advanced configurations, but generally receives positive feedback for responsive customer support.
Pricing and ROI: Steelhead is favored for its competitive setup costs and faster ROI. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, despite higher initial costs, delivers significant long-term value through its extensive feature set, justifying its pricing to many users.
They are now back to do that with the remainder of their company, so they've realized the value in 12 months and are willing to invest in the remainder of their organization.
Without Steelhead, we would have spent much more on bandwidth costs.
I would consider Cisco support a 10 out of 10.
The principal third-level support is very good.
Cisco's ongoing reorganizations have affected the quality of technical support, which varies depending on the engineer handling cases.
Steelhead's support is generally good for typical issues yet can be time-consuming during complex problem-solving across teams, particularly for Active Directory integration.
Riverbed's customer service and technical support would be rated an eight.
The ease of configuration and features like zero-touch provisioning enhance the scalability of Cisco SD-WAN, especially in disaster recovery situations.
Cisco SD-WAN is highly scalable and can be expanded to more than 10,000 sites.
It allows us to maximize use from our MPLS providers by handling traffic efficiently across phased deployments.
While some software-related issues and bugs were encountered, they did not cause the whole environment to crash.
It's quite stable and provides all necessary alerts if something is wrong.
Steelhead helps significantly with large data transfers.
Now, they change frequently, making it difficult to obtain long-term support.
The negative, or the downside of Cisco is the knowledge base; you need to be a little bit more tech-savvy and network-savvy to work with Cisco, while Juniper is a lot more user-friendly from what I can see, especially in terms of configuration and any kind of roll back.
Including more features like integrating with Splunk for monitoring vulnerabilities would help eliminate the need for other SOC solutions.
It could still be useful in places with satellite communications, such as the south of Chile, or in the mining industry.
It would help if Riverbed could prevent such drastic impacts during updates.
The pricing of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is rated between eight and nine out of ten, where ten is the most expensive.
It is also relatively cost-effective for smaller businesses when using the Meraki version.
Its pricing is justifiable due to the comprehensive solution it offers.
Buying the hardware initially is costly, but yearly maintenance and licenses are not as expensive.
Steelhead is considered an expensive solution in our country.
It also provides robust security features, including port security, analysis, mirroring, and multiple other security solutions.
Security is standard compliant, eliminating config drift that was prevalent before manual configurations.
The most useful feature for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is the single pane of glass management because we also use Meraki onsite.
Functions like acting as an NTP server, DNS, DHCP, and auto-optimization mode enhance efficiency.
Steelhead's most valuable feature is its ability to hash and send only the important parts of the information, avoiding the resending of data.
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN serves to connect remote offices, reduce MPLS costs, and facilitate cloud and internet access while providing secure connectivity and centralized management for hybrid networks.
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is leveraged for secure connectivity, load balancing, VPN, centralized network management, and migrating from traditional networks to SD-WAN. It supports hybrid networks, enabling centralized management across branches and data centers, improving security, and optimizing bandwidth usage. Industries such as banking and retail benefit from its capabilities for secure and efficient network management.
What are the main features of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN?
What benefits should be considered in reviews?
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN's implementation in banking enhances secure transaction communication between branches and data centers. Retailers utilize it to ensure steady connectivity for point-of-sale systems and inventory management. Organizations benefit from centralized management, making it easier to handle networks across multiple locations.
Steelhead is the leading network optimization and application performance solution chosen by over 30,000 organizations worldwide. The performance of networks and applications directly impacts business productivity. Riverbed draws from nearly two decades of experience in driving network and application performance over Wide Area Networks with its flagship offering, SteelHead. SteelHead delivers the underlying technology that helps enterprises of all sizes maximize the efficiency and performance of the networks and applications used to run modern business.
SteelHead is proven to dramatically speed up the performance of applications anywhere in the organization while delivering the best end-user experience even under sub optimal network conditions. Reduce bandwidth utilization by up to 95%, deferring costly network bandwidth upgrades. Increase performance by up to 100x for on-premises applications.
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