The Interceptor appliance extends the scaling and performance capabilities of Steelhead® appliances to meet the requirements of very large data center environments. The Interceptor appliance allows clusters of up to 25 Steelhead appliances to work together seamlessly, and can greatly simplify network set up, while offering an even wider choice of high-availability configurations to support the largest and most complex enterprise networks. This enables customers to scale their WAN optimization solutions to support hundreds of thousands of end users across an enterprise, as well as very high bandwidth WAN links into the data center.

Benefits

 • Increased scalability to accelerate more users and applications in high
   bandwidth environments

 • Simplified deployment of appliances in very large datacenters

 • High Availability configurations to keep WAN optimization running

Feature Summary
Scalability  • Cluster up 25 Steelhead appliances  • Up to 1,000,000 concurrent    connections  • Up to sixteen 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports   (SX & LX)  • Up to eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports  • Ether-channel support	Configuration and Management  • Familiar RiOS user interface  • Variable and Auto Connection    Distribution  • QoS compatible
High Availability  • Real-time cluster management  • Failover support  • Link state propagation	Platform  • 3U rack mount chassis  • Redundant power supplies

Feature Details

Up to 1,000,000 concurrent connections. Interceptor appliances enable large numbers of Steelhead appliances to work in parallel, optimizing up to 1,000,000 connections. The Interceptor supports in-path configurations over a single interface as large as a 6 Gbps etherchannel trunk.

Up to sixteen 1 Gigabit or eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports. . Interceptor appliances can be configured with a choice of 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports to provide maximum scalability on networks with multi-router ingress/egress.

Ether-channel support. Interceptor appliances provide ether-channel support to expand bandwidth capacity in a variety of combinations to suit any environment. One 6Gbps interface, one 4Gbps and one 2 Gbps interface, or three 2Gbps interfaces are all supported.

TCP Connection Forwarding. Very large environments with asymmetrically-routed networks can employ Connection Forwarding technology between appliances to ensure connection continuity. Connection Forwarding works with up to 20 Interceptor appliances in single or failover mode.

Real-time cluster management. The Interceptor allows real-time addition, modification, or removal of Steelhead appliances in a connection distribution group, with no disruption to operations in progress.

High availability deployment options. Interceptor appliances provide high availability for continued optimization operations in the event of a hardware failure. Configurations include: in series, in parallel, in quad and with multi-inpath clustering.

Link-state propagation. To ensure consistency throughout networking monitoring systems, Interceptor appliances will propagate a link state change to an opposing network device.

Peering control. Interceptor appliances have fine grained control of what traffic gets optimized and how through the configuration of load balancing rules. This can be implemented in probe or non-probe modes, or by IP address.

Connection tracing. Interceptor appliances can support up to 10 rules tracing up to 1000 connections to assist in debugging networking issues. The traces record a list of events including load balancing and optimization activities.

Full transparency support. Interceptor appliances are automatically enabled to work with the Full IP Address and Port Transparency feature in Steelhead appliances for environments that require more visibility into their network traffic.

Variable and Auto Connection Distribution. Interceptor appliances provide several means of distributing connections between Steelhead appliances in a cluster group, including algorithms for connection allocation based on source IP address, destination IP address, destination port, or the VLAN routing the connection. In the absence of custom rule sets, the Interceptor will dynamically determine the least-loaded Steelhead appliances to which it will direct traffic.

QoS compatible. Interceptor appliances maintain all QoS markings (DSCP and IP Precedence) on traffic it optimizes, ensuring that priority traffic can still be classified.

Typical Interceptor Deployment

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