We have a remote office location located in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. The site is serviced by a slower internet connection which gives us less that 10Mbps. The remote site is connected to our primary office in Fort Worth, Texas, USA via a site-to-site VPN. The VPN tunnel is currently serviced by a Meraki on one end and a Cisco ASA on the other.
We routinely have a very slow connection between sites, particularly when the remote internet connection is saturated. The Canadian Olympic Hockey games were a bit of a drain earlier this year.
Plans are in place to increase the bandwidth at the remote site by changing the connection to a faster pipe, but that is proving to be problematic. I am not convinced that this new pipe will resolve latency and connection issues between sites.
I am interested in using a WAN optimization tool to improve site to site connectivity. Riverbed has been investigated in the past, but the price was daunting at the time. It has been several years since previous research was performed and the landscape has changed.
Can the community provide some opinions on Riverbed, Silver Peak, or other tools to solve similar challenges? The primary traffic between sites is HTTP, HTTPS, and Exchange data. There will be some shared folder action as well, but that will decrease over time as files are migrated to our content management system.
I am open to either appliance or virtual, as long as costs are in line and performance is not sacrificed.