Riverbed Introduces Enterprise-Class Server And Data Consolidation Solution

Riverbed Technology, the application performance company, has introduced a new release of its Riverbed Granite product family that delivers an enterprise-class solution for server and data consolidation. With expanded capacity and higher performance IT managers can now extend the benefits of Granite to larger branch offices and data-intensive applications that previously were difficult or impossible to consolidate.

Granite is a technology that empowers businesses of all sizes to remove servers and data from branch offices and centralise them in the secure datacentre—without sacrificing user experience. This new architectural approach makes it possible to centralise backup operations and get data out of high-risk locations, while increasing agility and lowering the costs of managing remote office IT. To succeed in this dynamic environment, IT leaders need agility, security and control, while business users demand performance. Granite delivers these benefits in a single solution.

This announcement includes new Granite 2.5 software that adds support for Fibre Channel to its existing iSCSI support, enabling Granite solutions to now support over 90% of the current enterprise-class storage array market. Granite 2.5 also improves data protection with automated snapshots and simplified support for existing datacentre class backup and recovery software. This news builds upon EMC E-Lab qualifying Granite with EMC VMAX in 2012 and the recently completed EMC E-Lab qualification of Granite with EMC VNX in June 2013. The performance of Granite 2.5 can be further enhanced with the addition of the new, purpose-built Steelhead EX 1360 model appliance, on which Granite can be hosted. The Steelhead EX 1360 model appliance offers enterprises greater capacity and performance for consolidating larger data stores back to the data center. Granite 2.5 and the Steelhead EX 1360 model appliance together deliver an enterprise-class solution for server and data consolidation that allow organisations to deploy any application to any location with high performance and reliability.

By consolidating data out of the branch and into the datacentre, Granite enables organisations to eliminate branch backup and recovery systems, shifting data protection operations to the secure datacentre and leaving data protection to skilled storage personnel. Granite 2.5 further simplifies data protection through enhanced support of industry-leading backup and recovery software solutions like Symantec NetBackup. Granite 2.5 also offers an enhanced centralised management user interface and simplified scheduling of hourly, daily or weekly application snapshots executed in the branch office and captured in the datacentre. As a result, Granite 2.5 delivers a single point of management for branch snapshot schedules simplifying data protection, resulting in improved recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO).

Remote and branch offices come in many sizes and with diverse application and data storage requirements. The Steelhead EX1360 model appliance consolidates larger data sets back to the datacentre while ensuring business continuity. The new model delivers local-speed experience for applications that need high-performance storage access such as high-volume transaction databases and geographic information systems (GIS) data modelling files that require high input/output per second (IOPS). In addition, the new Steelhead appliance also enables organisations with larger data workloads to increase the amount of data it can lock within the appliance cache, increasing the ability of branch offices with larger data sets to maintain productivity, even during WAN outages. The new Steelhead EX1360 model appliance enables a broader range of organisations to deploy Granite storage delivery solutions, even those branches with demanding application and heavy compute and storage workloads without fear of performance degradation or productivity loss.