Riverbed Granite With New Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure …

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced a new architectural approach called edge virtual server infrastructure (edge-VSI) that does for edge servers what virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) did for desktops: it allows IT to consolidate and manage all edge servers in the data center.

But unlike VDI, edge-VSI does this while delivering 20-50% lower TCO.

Riverbed Granite is a new product that enables edge-VSI.

With Granite, enterprises can achieve complete consolidation of edge applications, servers and storage to the data center, while delivering services to the edge of the enterprise as if they were local. Edge-VSI is complementary to WAN optimization, accelerating performance for applications and use cases not addressed by WAN optimization approach today.

"We have offices across Asia, Europe and the United States and are pursuing a completely consolidated infrastructure to reduce our management requirements and lower our operating costs. Though we had centralized most of our IT infrastructure, we still had servers and storage in our remote locations," said Searl Tate, director of engineering, Paul Hastings. "Granite allows us to consolidate these remaining servers and storage and at the same time deliver the local application performance our remote employees demand. This complete consolidation model will reduce our total cost of ownership by a third, while reducing our risk profile and giving us the control we need."

Granite allows storage to be decoupled from its server over thousands of miles – and actually work as if the storage were local to the server. The user gets performance, while IT is able to manage, backup, provision, patch, expand, and protect the data for its far-flung enterprise all within the four walls of the data center. Organizations that deploy Granite are expected to save up to 50% over traditional approaches to managing distributed infrastructure by eliminating backup and recovery processes in remote locations, consolidating underutilized edge servers and storage, and cutting many of the general IT administration costs including travel associated with managing infrastructure at the edge.

Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure:
Addressing Performance Beyond the Application Level
Thousands of organizations have benefited by deploying WAN optimization for a variety of reasons: application acceleration, consolidation, bandwidth savings and BC/DR. However, for many organizations committed to complete consolidation of global infrastructure, a few servers often remain in the branch. Granite was developed to allow organizations to remove those remaining servers and achieve complete consolidation.

"Traditionally, data centers and remote offices have been managed through separate operational processes, procedures and infrastructures," said Dave Russell, Research Vice President, Storage Technologies and Strategies, at Gartner. "In an ideal world, IT could leverage its investment in building the data center of the future by putting its IT infrastructure into one central data center, with its control, economies of scale, and security. However, with workers at large enterprises distributed across the globe, performance is a key challenge, especially for storage heavy workloads. To make this a reality, a new approach is needed that addresses these currently challenging workloads."

The demands of custom and write-intensive applications in the branch, the need to work with large data-sets that defy existing WAN optimization techniques and the concern of user productivity in the face of WAN outages have forced businesses to maintain costly storage and application servers at the edge of the enterprise, increasing IT footprint and introducing administration and infrastructure overhead.

Granite solves bandwidth and latency problems over distributed networks, but lower in the technology stack – at the block level – making it possible to deliver global storage and server infrastructure extended from the data center over the WAN. By adding file system intelligence to the block layer, it parallelizes interactions between server and storage that were otherwise sequential. Distributed data and servers can now reside in one place and the performance for users at the edge will not be impacted, all while eliminating up to 50% of the costs associated with managing distributed infrastructure.

Granite requires two components: Granite Core, a physical or virtual appliance in the data center, and Granite Edge, a service running on a Steelhead EX in the branch office. By combining Steelhead EX + Granite, organizations can take advantage of consolidation and centralization with a combination of WAN optimization, virtual services platform and block-storage optimization. Alternatively, Granite Edge is available as a standalone appliance.

"Our employees often work on very large CAD files – hundreds of megabytes – which are difficult to share across the WAN. Since we’ve consolidated this data to a centralized data center, we thought performance would be an issue. However, Granite now allows us to store data in the data center, and project CAD documents from the data center storage over the WAN to local offices without impacting end user experience," said Mitchel Weinberger, IT manager at GeoEngineers. "The combination of Steelhead appliances and Granite allows us to eliminate physical hardware at the branch and the associated maintenance costs, solidify a disaster recovery strategy for the branches, and have backup processes run by system administrators."

"As we talk to our customers and ask them to whiteboard their ideal IT infrastructure they are highlighting the need to have centralized control of sprawled infrastructure. The evolution of virtualization and consolidation, along with Granite, is allowing organizations to achieve this dream," said Eric Wolford, executive vice president and GM, products at Riverbed.

Granite is expected to be available this quarter.