Riverbed SteelFusion Enables Blach Construction to Improve DR

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced Blach Construction Company is using its SteelFusion appliances to improve the firm’s DR capability, simplify IT infrastructure at remote construction sites, and increase overall profitability in a close-margin business.

SteelFusion branch converged infrastructure simplifies remote site applications and data by centralizing it back to the data center to increase control and security without sacrificing local performance for remote site users.

Serving Northern California since 1970, Blach Construction offers a range of industries and construction types: education, corporate offices, medical facilities, historic preservation, high technology, and non-profits. The company differentiates itself in a variety of ways, one being its use of technology to improve profitability in a tight-margin business.

Dominic Silvia, Blach Construction’s director of IT, leads the team that applies technology to affect the firm’s bottom line, such as deploying an ERP system with integrated project management, and more efficiently managing IT infrastructure at job sites for better employee productivity. He does all of this with a small IT team (three people to support the approximately 185-person company) that has to support infrastructure at up to 30 or 40 job sites during busy times.

In addition to the projects that support the firm’s activities, Silvia must cope with the usual IT challenges such as planning for DR, outages and data loss, while also making decisions about where to host various services (cloud vs. data center vs. HQs) in the firm’s increasingly hybrid IT environment. He and his team rely on solutions from Riverbed to help make all this possible and keep applications performing at local speed no matter where they are hosted – in the branch, in the data center, or in the cloud.

The firm purchased SteelFusion as a creative and cost-effective DR solution. By deploying a SteelFusion Core appliance in its data center and a SteelFusion Edge appliance at the company’s HQs, which is a remote site away from the data center in this case, management’s immediate concerns about data security were alleviated.

“Now if somebody breaks into our remote sites, including our HQ office and steals our equipment, our data is safe in the data center – all we have to do is replace our SteelFusion Edge appliance,” said Silvia. “And with SteelFusion, even though data is stored in a different location, application performance in the HQs is as good as it was when all data and applications were stored on-site.“

Silvia expects additional benefits in the future, when a SteelFusion appliance becomes part of the IT environment at job sites.

“I can see a SteelFusion appliance tied into the Building Information Modeling so that people could work with 3D building models at the job sites,” said Silvia. “SteelFusion would give the performance people need to build and navigate through models on site from remote data, which isn’t possible now because latency is too high.“

Another advantage of having SteelFusion at the job sites is that all building data would remain safely in the data center.

“There isn’t anything like SteelFusion in the marketplace – where you can actually run servers locally and have the storage projected back to the data center – and have WAN optimization as well,” Silvia explained.

He sees Blach Construction’s use of Riverbed technology as a competitive advantage.

“Riverbed Technology has helped my team achieve Blach’s current infrastructure goals and therefore has helped us better support the business,” he said.

Riverbed SteelFusion and Application Performance Management Platform
The Application Performance Platform enables CIOs to deliver, control, and optimize IT resources across the hybrid enterprise. A key part of the platform, SteelFusion is a branch converged infrastructure solution that eliminates the headache of branch office IT. It converges servers and storage into a single branch appliance while centralizing data back to the datacenter, all without sacrificing any of the benefits of having branch services running locally for users. It expedites branch office provisioning, backup, and recovery and ensures continuous operations when disasters occur such as inclement weather, fire, and human-induced outages. With SteelFusion, businesses can restore operations in a matter of minutes vs. days, centrally protect and secure data, and lower the TCO of branch and remote offices.