Riverbed SteelFusion Achieves EMC VSPEX Validation 

Riverbed Technology today announced Riverbed SteelFusion validation with the EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, which offers an open integration approach that brings together best-in-class technologies to create and deliver flexible IT solutions for customers. SteelFusion’s validation with VSPEX allows joint customers to virtualize branch servers and storage, centralize backup operations, recover branch services instantly and get data out of high-risk locations by protecting it across multiple data centers.

Riverbed, a Select member of the EMC Business Partner Program for Technology Connect Partners, has also achieved E-Lab qualification for SteelFusion and the EMC VNX and VMAX platforms to deliver product integrations that ease implementation and offer seamless data protection and business continuity. By delivering a simplified IT architecture, SteelFusion deployed with VSPEX addresses the IT challenges customers face with branch offices and provides higher application performance, data protection, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

The typical data center serves 55 branches and only eight percent of these branches have fully consolidated IT infrastructure. As a result, according to IDC, more than $4 billion is being spent on remote office infrastructure and maintenance every year. In the past, 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. Riverbed pioneered the branch converged infrastructure market to address these problems by launching SteelFusion.

“EMC VSPEX is a simple, efficient and flexible solution optimized for the most popular use cases for customers moving to cloud computing,” said Pete Eggimann, Director, VSPEX Ecosystem Program, EMC Corporation. “Riverbed SteelFusion provides a solution for the branch office that allows data to be consolidated in the data center on VSPEX private cloud infrastructure where it can be centrally managed and protected.”

SteelFusion helps customers achieve branch converged infrastructure by allowing them to:

1. Converge. The first step to redefining the branch is to converge the islands of remote infrastructure onto a single, purpose-built platform. Riverbed SteelFusion brings VMware vSphere to the branch, enabling all branch workloads to be managed centrally from VMware vCenter. The result is an up to 30x time reduction in branch service provisioning.
2. Centralize. Once converged, the second step is to centralize branch data back to your data center storage area network (SAN). Riverbed and EMC help companies virtualize, centralize and protect branch data seamlessly. The result is an up to 96x reduction in branch recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) of seconds.
3. Replicate. Once branch data is centralized, the third step is to replicate it to secondary sites. Riverbed integrates seamlessly with EMC’s VNX enterprise storage platforms to provide application-consistent snapshots of branch data. This data can then be replicated using enterprise storage tools like EMC RecoverPoint and Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimization technology.

“Islands of remote infrastructure are difficult to support and cost-inefficient, yet branch offices hold more than 50% of corporate data, making that data vulnerable to loss and theft. By leveraging the flexibility of the VSPEX platform, Riverbed and EMC allow customers to transition to the cloud and deploy virtualized infrastructure that secures and centralizes data without losing any of the speed and access branch workers require to get business done,” said John Martin, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Storage Delivery at Riverbed. “Over the years we’ve worked together to integrate best-of-breed products so customers can access and secure data regardless of location, while building a strong channel to support customer needs and deployments.”