For some time now I’ve been test driving the Riverbed Solution known as SteelConnect. The particular solution that I am testing was featured at TechFieldDay Extra at ONUG16. In full disclosure, Riverbed provided me with hosted access to SteelConnect Manager, and two physical appliances, the SDI130 gateway and an SDI-AP5. I placed both of these units at my office in Temecula, California, and tried to set it up as our primary network connectivity. My thought was that even though this was presented to us as an SD-WAN solution, I believe it could be used as the primary hardware in an SMB. These are my findings.
Initial Install.
In the presentation at TFDx @ ONUG16 the setup and configuration seemed incredibly easy. So much so that I tried to set things up without looking at any documentation. On setting the network up I needed to connect the gateway to my Frontier FiOS which has static IP addressing. Since the gateway appears to ship with DHCP configured I initially installed a border device. I know this is probably what everyone else on the planet is going to do. Still, the gateway seems to have some firewall features embedded and my curiosity of installing without a border device was still there. In the mean time I installed an ASA 5506-X at my Internet edge. The ASA gave the SDI-130 it’s DHCP configuration.