Riverbed's SteelFusion 3.0 Will Transform Branch Office IT

Changing the economics of IT for remote offices, Riverbed (RVBD) launched SteelFusion 3.0,  the first branch converged infrastructure that centralizes data in the data center, delivers local performance, and offers nearly instant recovery at the branch office.

Previously known as Riverbed Granite, the new SteelFusion 3.0 brings together branch servers, storage, networking, and virtualization infrastructure into a single solution that, as measured by Taneja Group, reduces the average time to provision branch services by 30x (from five hours to ten minutes) and recovery from branch outages by 96x (from 24 hours to 15 minutes).

“With more and more branches and data, organizations are struggling with the cost and inefficiency of managing islands of infrastructure – servers, apps and storage – outside the data center," said John Martin, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Storage Delivery at Riverbed. "Riverbed developed the first solution that delivers all the benefits of converged infrastructure found in the data center, such as performance, security, scalability, better disaster recovery, and manageability, but optimized for the unique requirements of the branch. Businesses get the best of both worlds:  centralizing data to eliminate branch downtime, improve data security, and lower TCO while still delivering local access to apps and data for branch workers.”

With the 3.0 release, SteelFusion 1360P features a 6x performance gain over the previous high-end SteelFusion appliance. Higher capacity on the storage delivery controller, the SteelFusion Core 3000, means storage admins can now support up to 100TB consolidated data, a 3x improvement over the previous high of 35TB supported.

A new predictive pre-fetch capability on the converged appliance, the Branch Recovery Agent further reduces recovery time from major outages. This ensures employees can remain productive with constant access to applications and data, despite major disasters.

Offering simplified operations, release 3 offers an improved scale-out architecture with pooled management of storage delivery controllers. A new recovery agent for the converged appliance makes it simpler and faster for administrators to recover a branch from a major outage.

Support for NetApp cluster mode and EMC VNX2 snapshots continue seamless integration advancements to ensure SteelFusion integrates seamlessly with data center SAN infrastructure to provide backup consolidation.

Riverbed SteelFusion 3.0 will be available in May. This video shows a Riverbed chalk talk, describing instant branch office recovery with SteelFusion 3.0.