Riverbed Technology announced this week that its hyper-converged edge offering Riverbed SteelFusion is extending its reach to cloud environments with support for Azure through Microsoft StorSimple and Amazon Web Services through AWS Storage Gateway.
Users now have more flexibility and choice for cloud-based data storage across remote locations and can leverage the cloud as a secondary storage tier for added capacity, backup, or for tiering in conjunction with private data center storage assets.
Combining virtualization, storage delivery, and WAN optimization, SteelFusion offers hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed with the challenges of remote and branch office (ROBO) IT in mind. SteelFusion removes physical servers, storage, and valuable data from ROBO locations, consolidates and accelerates time-consuming ROBO IT operations, such as backup processes and data protection, provisioning of new services and sites, and fast recovery to central data centers in a single solution, and extends enterprise-class security, services and resiliency of the central data center, and now the cloud, out to all ROBO locations, regardless of distance, and without compromising performance.
This announcement builds on the SteelFusion 4.0 release last April 2015 that delivered updated and redesigned hardware platforms to provide increased performance and scalability for remote sites and regional hubs of all sizes.
In November, Riverbed announced SteelFusion support for customers using VMware vSphere 6. Now, Riverbed is continuing to expand its SteelFusion ecosystem with other cloud providers AWS and Microsoft, giving enterprises the additional flexibility to access cloud-based storage, backup, and tiering capabilities from one centralized location, removing the need to invest in costly physical servers at remote locations.
As businesses are counting on always-on access to their data regardless of where it’s stored. IT on the other hand, cares a great deal about the location of data. Location determines IT staffing constraints, infrastructure footprint, storage capacity, DR and backup processes, security postures, and more.
SteelFusion 4.3 aligns to that phased cloud deployment model by delivering cloud storage gateway integration with Azure and AWS (StorSimple, and Amazon Storage Gateway respectively).
For current SteelFusion users, this enhancement can be added quite simply by way of a software upgrade to either the physical or virtual SteelFusion appliance.
Now cloud-storage, in addition to private data center SAN storage, is transparently available to remote and branch offices (ROBOs) without compromising on local application performance. This allows IT to provide unique and granular service level agreements (SLAs) based on users different business requirements.
Unlike hyper-converged solutions purpose-built to simplify data center infrastructures, SteelFusion is built to enable the “hyper-converged edge.” SteelFusion simultaneously meets the top requirements of businesses, IT organizations and employees by reducing the operational cost of managing remote locations, increasing data security, improving business continuity and IT agility with 100 times faster recovery times and 30 times faster deployment of branch services and sites, and providing up to a 100 times increase in application performance at the branch for greater productivity.
The Riverbed Application Performance Platform gives CIOs complete visibility, optimization and control across the enterprise. Riverbed SteelFusion is a key part of the platform, which also includes Riverbed SteelCentral for network visibility and control, Riverbed SteelHead and SD-WAN (software-defined wide-area network) solutions that deliver new levels of business agility.
