Today Riverbed Technology announced the latest version of its branch converged infrastructure solution, SteelFusion 4.0 (SteelFusion was formally known as Granite). This time around, SteelFusion will act as what Riverbed is calling “zero branch IT.” All physical assets (servers, storage, and backup) at the remote branch will be completely consolidated. SteelFusion will lead to better application performance, instant recovery, data centralization, and lower total cost of ownership.
Today Riverbed Technology announced the latest version of its branch converged infrastructure solution, SteelFusion 4.0 (SteelFusion was formally known as Granite). This time around, SteelFusion will act as what Riverbed is calling “zero branch IT.” All physical assets (servers, storage, and backup) at the remote branch will be completely consolidated. SteelFusion will lead to better application performance, instant recovery, data centralization, and lower total cost of ownership.
Branch offices, remote locations, and storefronts are all extremely important to business growth. However, from an IT standpoint these locations can be expensive to maintain and the sites are generally maintained in an inefficient manner. According to Riverbed, 50% of enterprise employees are based at branch offices, 50% of company data is outside the data center (and thus unprotected), and 50% of IT’s budget goes to branch office support.
SteelFusion 4.0 aims to fix the above-mentioned problems by extending the power, security, and efficiency of the data center to the branch office. All branch IT will be consolidated and managed centrally. This consolidation will not hinder performance in fact overall performance should increase. The management will be a simple as accessing apps and data on a smartphone. Riverbed is also rolling out new SteelFusion Edge and Core platforms as well as new FusionSync software that will sync multiple data centers. In the case of a data center failure, the branch or remote office will continue to function. FusionSync also has a single click instant recovery.
New enhancements include:
- New SteelFusion Edge platforms – this new platform supports larger branch offices and even regional hubs. It has 256GB of memory enabling the platform to run a greater number of local workloads. Three of the new Edge models will support the Advanced Tiering Cache, which compliments the existing write cache with solid-state read functionality. The newer models will replace all previous SteelFusion Edge platforms.
- A new SteelFusion Core platform – A single appliance can now support 100 to 150TB branch locations enable IT to scale and support larger deployments.
- FusionSync – ensuring all branch office data is accessible in the event of a data center failure by syncing branch office data across private and hybrid cloud environments.
Availability
SteelFusion 4.0 is available now and is expected to start shipping in May 2015.
