Riverbed:

Riverbed shipped its first product, the Steelhead appliance in May of 2004. The Steelhead
appliance is a WAN optimization appliance that employs a combination of data reduction, TCP
acceleration, and application-layer protocol optimizations. Riverbed's Steelhead appliance is
installed symmetrically or on both sides of a network connection. In addition to the Steelhead
appliance, which is aimed at data centers and branch offices, Riverbed sells Steelhead Mobile
software that is deployed on laptop computers.

The workhorse of Riverbed's Steelhead is Scalable Data Referencing (SDR). This is a

mechanism by which variable-length chunks of data are examined and a reference is generated.
The local Steelhead then stores both reference and data in its datastore and sends this information
to the distant Steelhead at the far end of the WAN link which also stores them. The next time the
identical data is transferred the local Steelhead only sends the reference. The distant Steelhead
uses the reference to retrieve data from its datastore and send it forward.