Riverbed refreshes SteelFusion family

Riverbed Technology, an application performance infrastructure provider, has announced Riverbed SteelFusion 3.0, branch converged infrastructure that centralises data in the data centre and delivers local performance and nearly instant recovery at the branch. SteelFusion 3.0, to be generally available early May, raises the bar with even faster branch recovery, higher data capacity, and faster performance.

Formerly known as Riverbed Granite, SteelFusion fuses branch servers, storage, networking, and virtualisation infrastructure into a single solution that, as measured by Taneja Group, reduces the average time to provision branch services by 30x (from five hours to ten minutes) and recovery from branch outages by 96x (from 24 hours to 15 minutes)*.

The typical data centre serves 55 branches** and only 8% of these branches have fully consolidated IT infrastructure***. As a result, IDC says more than US$4 billion is being spent on remote office infrastructure and maintenance every year. 

All of the islands of distributed branch infrastructure have been necessary to meet local performance and reliability needs to ensure the productivity of employees working in branch offices; however, they are costly and inefficient to manage. In addition, companies rarely have the expertise in branches to maintain and protect data in such distributed infrastructure, and when branch offices suffer outages due to natural or manmade disasters, employee productivity and data are compromised and company revenue is impacted.

“With more and more branches and data, organisations are struggling with the cost and inefficiency of managing islands of infrastructure – servers, apps and storage – outside the data centre,” said John Martin, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Storage Delivery at Riverbed. “With SteelFusion, Riverbed has completely changed the game with branch IT infrastructure. Businesses get the best of both worlds: centralising data to eliminate branch downtime, improve data security, and lower TCO while still delivering local access to apps and data for branch workers.”

Riverbed pioneered the branch converged infrastructure market to address these problems by launching Riverbed Granite, now called Riverbed SteelFusion. To date, the solution is helping customers centralise and protect an estimated 47 petabytes of branch data in their data centre and consolidate an estimated 87,000 branch servers.  


Read the blog post introducing SteelFusion here, and watch the associated video here. A US case study is available here, and the Taneja report can be viewed here. 

*Convergence For The Branch Office: Transforming Resiliency and TCO with Riverbed SteelFusion, Taneja Group Technology Validation, April, 2014
** Enhancing Business Value with an Edge-Optimized Virtual Server and Storage Delivery Solution, IDC, June 2013
*** Successfully Consolidating Branch-Office Infrastructure In The Face Of More Users, Services, and Devices, Forrester, October 2011