Riverbed SteelFusion Helps Tecan Trading Cut Provisioning Time of IT Services

Riverbed Technology, Inc., in application performance infrastructure, announced that Tecan Trading AG, a provider of laboratory instrumentation and diagnostic solutions, is using its SteelFusion to enable its ‘Flexible Service Infrastructure,’ which turns IT into a fluid resource that can adapt to meet changing business needs.

SteelFusion, a hyper-converged infrastructure solution, enables zero IT at the branch by virtualizing and consolidating 100% of data and servers from remote sites into data centers, as well as centralizing data security and IT management without losing the benefit of running branch services locally. Tecan Trading’s virtualized architecture makes it easier for the company to automate, provision, backup and restore branch offices from the data center. In fact, the zero branch IT approach of SteelFusion has reduced provisioning time for Tecan Trading for new branch offices by 80%.

Growth over the last two decades had added IT complexity and created a sprawling architecture of servers, storage, processes and applications. As a result, Tecan Trading needed more flexibility from its IT, easier provisioning of branch offices and more standardized backup and restore processes for data security. Duplication and under-utilization were also problematic with servers dispersed across an area in order to deliver computing resources locally. With no global standardization in place, management was complex and the TCO high.

“We were looking for much more flexibility and to centralize as much as possible in our data center in Zürich. We wanted a single point solution rather than the cumbersome and complex multi-point situation we had been using,” said Marc Ehinger, head of global IT infrastructure, Tecan Trading. “Our overall approach is very similar to Riverbed’s vision of the hybrid enterprise. At Tecan, we call it a ‘Flexible Service Infrastructure.’ Our goal is for IT to be a fluid resource that we can flex an assign as we need. We are a global company and need to deliver a service wherever and whenever the business needs it. Riverbed SteelFusion provides us with an IT infrastructure that is flexible enough for our business needs and delivers the security and centralized control we require.“

With SteelFusion, Tecan Trading gets local performance for applications, instant recovery in the face of outages, and the security and scalability that come from data centralization. Having one common architecture has freed the company from its former fragmented branch architecture and enables it to support mobile workers, cloud services and virtual computing for decreased infrastructure costs.

“Our new common architecture means we can now manage IT resources centrally,” said Ehinger. “We’ve offloaded the burden of managing local infrastructure from branch staff. We can move applications, servers or storage around and optimize our SLAs and it is now much easier to scale our business. Whereas before it took around 6 months, we can now set up a new branch office with servers and storage in a few weeks. I don’t see how we could have done this without Riverbed.“

Riverbed SteelFusion and Application Performance Platform
The Riverbed Application Performance Platform gives CIOs end-to-end visibility, optimization and control across an entire enterprise. A key part of the platform, SteelFusion is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is designed to enable zero IT at the branch. SteelFusion consolidates 100% of data and servers out of branches and into the datacenter where it can be properly secured, managed and protected, while ensuring fast local performance of branch applications and services. It extends the power, security and resiliency of the datacenter out to each branch site resulting in data security, increased business agility and BC.