Manage Mobile WAN Acceleration with the Steelhead Mobile Controller

Overview

The Steelhead Mobile Controller (SMC) manages Steelhead Mobile licenses and controls the deployment, management, and reporting of Steelhead Mobile software clients. Using the SMC, IT managers can quickly and easily deploy Steelhead Mobile to all of their remote workers and employees on the go.

The SMC is a 1U rackable appliance that manages Steelhead Mobile deployments through optimization policy control, detailed user-level reporting, and administrative troubleshooting capability.

The SMC uses simple MSI software packages to push out the Steelhead Mobile software client to end-user laptops and PCs. The software can be deployed in "visible" mode whereby users can see the Steelhead Mobile r software running in their icon tray and can adjust a few options, or "invisible" mode, where only the administrator knows that the Steelhead Mobile software is running on the machine.

Because the SMC manages licenses on a concurrent user basis, administrators can deploy Steelhead Mobile to all end-user machines as part of their standard build. When users require a connection they automatically check with the SMC for an available license and then begin their optimized sessions.

The Steelhead Mobile product uses an easy to manage, scalable concurrent licensing model. Instead of buying a license for each individual end user, IT administrators simply manage a 'pool' of licenses on a Steelhead Mobile Controller. These licenses can be used by anyone running the Steelhead Mobile software on their laptop. Then users around the organization can all take advantage of Steelhead Mobile's acceleration benefits.

IT administrators get simplified management of licenses that scales really well: costs are controlled by how many licenses are purchased, and new licenses can easily be added to the pool of concurrent licenses. IT administrators get the additional benefit that they can simply make Steelhead Mobile software part of the standard operating environment, including the software on every machine as they image it, without incurring additional costs.

Similar to the Central Management Console for Steelhead appliances, the SMC includes in-depth reporting on Steelhead Mobile client performance. Using the SMC, IT managers can report aggregated or individual statistics on throughput improvements as well as bandwidth optimization.





Each SMC can support up to 2,000 concurrent Steelhead Mobile clients and can also be clustered to scale beyond the per SMC limit. Clustering also creates high availability configurations that ensure users always have accelerated mobile access to key applications and data.