Riberbed SteelFusion Extends Power of Cloud to ROBOs

Riverbed Technology, Inc., in application performance infrastructure, announced that Riverbed SteelFusion, the industry hyper-converged edge solution is extending its reach to cloud environments with support for Azure through Microsoft StorSimple and Amazon Web Services through AWS Storage Gateway.

Customers have more flexibility and choice for cloud-based 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.

“We are excited to give our SteelFusion customers more options and flexibility with the ability to store their remote data in the cloud, whether it be with Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services,” said Paul O’Farrell, SVP and GM, SteelHead, SteelFusion and SD-WAN solutions, Riverbed. “Many of today’s enterprises are already using a hybrid IT model, with data both in the cloud and data center. Now with access to cloud-based storage and backup capabilities with SteelFusion, our customers can easily leverage the cloud as a secondary storage tier without any impact to users at the edge.“

This announcement builds on the SteelFusion 4.0 release in 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 vSphere 6. Riverbed is continuing to expand its SteelFusion ecosystem with cloud providers AWS and Microsoft, giving enterprises the additional flexibility to access cloud-based storage, backup, and tiering capabilities from one centralized location – eliminating the need to invest in costly physical servers at remote locations.

“Enterprise Strategy Group is very impressed with SteelFusion’s unique capabilities for greatly simplifying virtualized application management, security and data protection in ROBO (remote office and branch office) locations,” said Colm Keegan, senior cloud analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Through a single hyper-converged appliance, SteelFusion provides businesses with an easy way to rapidly deploy virtualized computing resources into ROBOs. The appliance provides all of the application performance, infrastructure scalability and HA requirements that are needed in branch offices, while enabling centralized IT administrators to manage and centrally backup and protect the critical business data residing on remotely based applications. Through SteelFusion, branches can be spun up, spun down, moved, backed-up, and restored amazingly fast all from the central data center, and now conveniently in the cloud, without requiring assistance from operational staff in the branch. SteelFusion helps businesses meet the variable application performance requirements of their ROBO locations while reducing complexity and mitigating risk.“

Combining virtualization, intelligent storage delivery, and industry WAN optimization, SteelFusion is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed with the challenges of ROBO IT in mind.

SteelFusion:

• Removes all 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 services and sites, and fast recovery to central data centers in a single solution
• Extends enterprise security, services and resiliency of the central data center, and the cloud, out to all ROBO locations, regardless of distance, and without compromising performance
  

Unlike hyper-converged solutions purpose-built to simplify data center infrastructures, SteelFusion is built to enable the ‘hyper-converged edge.’  It simultaneously meets the requirements of businesses, IT organizations and employees by reducing the operational cost of managing remote locations, increasing data security, improving BC and IT agility with 100x faster recovery times and 30x faster deployment of branch services and sites, and providing up to a 100x increase in application performance at the branch for greater productivity.

Riverbed SteelFusion and the Riverbed Application Performance Platform
The Riverbed Application Performance Platform gives CIOs end-to-end visibility, optimization and control across an entire enterprise. SteelFusion is a key part of the platform, which also includes Riverbed SteelCentral for network visibility and control, Riverbed SteelHead – the solution for WAN optimization and application performance – and SD-WAN (software-defined wide-area network) solutions that deliver business agility.