Riverbed Technology announced Riverbed SteelFusion 4.0,
which the company claims as the first and only hyper-converged infrastructure
solution for the branch of the future. SteelFusion 4.0 enables zero IT at the
branch by virtualizing and consolidating 100% of data and servers from remote
sites into data centers, centralizing data security and IT management without
losing the benefits of running branch services locally. SteelFusion meets the
IT challenges of today’s sprawling branch environments by enabling
organizations to remove all servers, storage, and backup from remote sites;
enabling instant provisioning and recovery; providing complete security and
visibility; and ensuring that applications simply work.
In SteelFusion 4.0, the hardware platforms have been
completely updated and redesigned to deliver increased performance and
scalability for remote sites and regional hubs of all sizes. SteelFusion 4.0
also introduces new FusionSync for seamless branch continuity. FusionSync
ensures that all branch data is accessible across private and hybrid cloud
environments, providing the ability to withstand and recover from data center
failures with zero downtime. Now, with SteelFusion 4.0, enterprises can deploy
a single hyper-converged solution to centralize all branch office data and
applications in the data center as well as leverage the cloud for continuity,
resulting in dramatic increases in data security, business continuity and
agility, operational efficiency and application performance.
An average of over 50% of enterprise employees are based at
branch offices (remote sites, job sites, stores, manufacturing plants, etc.),
meaning that if branch applications don’t perform, branch workers can’t work
and business is lost with direct impacts to the top and bottom line. Branch
offices, remote locations and store fronts are critical for local customer
engagement, but they require IT staff to support many islands of infrastructure
that are costly and inefficient to maintain and yet necessary to meet local
performance and reliability needs. Today, 50% of company data and intellectual
property still lives outside the data center, leaving it unprotected, open to
compromise and data breaches. Backup processes are cumbersome and data recovery
is time-consuming or even futile without qualified IT staff at most branches,
not to mention the challenges of provisioning new services or applications in
an agile world. These activities, and others that support branch IT operations,
consume 50% of IT budgets.
SteelFusion changes the game so that enterprises can rethink
branch IT. For example, one can imagine the branch analogously as a smart phone
– a thin, small device that has access to all the applications and data of the
Internet and cloud. And yet, when one
buys a smart phone, the provider doesn’t also provide a backpack full of
application servers, storage, and backup infrastructure to carry with it. In
the age of the cloud, branch IT should be the same way, and now it can be with
Riverbed SteelFusion 4.0.
“Branches are the
front lines of business with increasing IT needs. However, the answer to
delivering customer-centric business is not to introduce more IT complexity and
infrastructure, but to rethink branch IT,” said Paul O’Farrell, Senior Vice
President and General Manager, SteelFusion and SteelHead Product Groups at
Riverbed. “With SteelFusion 4.0, Riverbed delivers the branch of the future
with a zero branch IT solution that eliminates the challenges of supporting
remote sites. This means getting all of the infrastructure — servers, storage
and backup — out of the branch and centralized into the data center. By doing so,
companies gain the agility to instantly provision new services and apps and to
recover data in minutes versus days. This also means data security and control
with full visibility, ensuring business continuity, and that apps perform as if
local. SteelFusion 4.0 delivers on all these promises and more.”
Many Riverbed customers are already benefiting from a zero
branch IT approach, including Weatherford, one of the largest global oil and
gas service providers. “Our operations cover oil rigs and offshore locations
where any disruption or unavailability of applications on site would result in
loss of production time,” explained Han Koon Er, Asia Pacific IT Manager,
Weatherford Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. “With Riverbed SteelFusion, we are able to
optimize data center processes and thereby eliminate file servers, storage and
other backup processes which require our IT teams to be dispatched to remote
locations. This has enabled focused production on site with peace of mind that
data is secured at our data center."
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