Enterprises can leverage cloud storage for backup or tieringin conjunction with private data center storage.
 
Riverbed Technology, the leader in application performance infrastructure, today announced that Riverbed® SteelFusion, the industry-leading hyper-converged edge solution is extending its reach to cloud environments with support for Azure through Microsoft StorSimple and Amazon Web Services through AWS Storage Gateway. Customers now have more flexibility and choice for cloud-based data storage across remote locations and can leverage the cloud as a secondary storage tier for added capacity, backup, or for tiering in conjunction with private data center storage assets.
 
“We are excited to give our SteelFusion customers more options and flexibility with the ability to store their remote data in the cloud, whether it be with Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services,” said Paul O’Farrell, Senior Vice President and General Manager of SteelHead, SteelFusion and SD-WAN solutions at Riverbed. “Many of today’s enterprises are already using a hybrid IT model, with data both in the cloud and data center. Now with access to cloud-based storage and backup capabilities with SteelFusion, our customers can easily leverage the cloud as a secondary storage tier without any impact to users at the edge.”

This announcement builds on the SteelFusion 4.0 release in April 2015 that delivered updated and redesigned hardware platforms to provide increased performance and scalability for remote sites and regional hubs of all sizes. In November, Riverbed announced SteelFusion support for customers using VMware vSphere 6. Now, Riverbed is continuing to expand its SteelFusion ecosystem with leading cloud providers AWS and Microsoft, giving enterprises the additional flexibility to access cloud-based storage, backup, and tiering capabilities from one centralized location – eliminating the need to invest in costly physical servers at remote locations.

“Enterprise Strategy Group is very impressed with SteelFusion’s unique capabilities for greatly simplifying virtualized application management, security and data protection in ROBO (remote office and branch office) locations,” said Colm Keegan, Senior Cloud Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Through a single hyper-converged appliance, SteelFusion provides businesses with an easy way to rapidly deploy virtualized computing resources into ROBOs. The appliance provides all of the application performance, infrastructure scalability and high availability requirements that are needed in branch offices, while enabling centralized IT administrators to manage and centrally backup and protect the critical business data residing on remotely based applications. Through SteelFusion, branches can be spun up, spun down, moved, backed-up, and restored amazingly fast all from the central data center, and now conveniently in the cloud, without requiring assistance from operational staff in the branch.

SteelFusion helps businesses meet the variable application performance requirements of their ROBO locations while reducing complexity and mitigating risk.” Combining best-of-breed virtualization, intelligent storage delivery, and industry-leading WAN optimization, SteelFusion is the only hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed with the unique challenges of remote and branch office IT in mind. SteelFusion:

• Removes all physical servers, storage, and valuable data from ROBO locations
• Consolidates and accelerates time-consuming ROBO IT operations, such as backup processes and data protection, provisioning of new services and sites, and fast recovery to central data centers in a single solution
• Extends enterprise-class security, services and resiliency of the central data center, and now the cloud, out to all ROBO locations, regardless of distance, and without compromising performance

Unlike hyper-converged solutions purpose-built to simplify data center infrastructures, SteelFusion is built to enable the “hyper-converged edge.”  SteelFusion simultaneously meets the top requirements of businesses, IT organizations and employees by reducing the operational cost of managing remote locations, increasing data security, improving business continuity and IT agility with 100x faster recovery times and 30x faster deployment of branch services and sites, and providing up to a 100x increase in application performance at the branch for greater productivity.

Riverbed SteelFusion and the Riverbed Application Performance Platform™ The Riverbed Application Performance Platform™ gives CIOs end-to-end visibility, optimization and control across an entire enterprise. Riverbed SteelFusion is a key part of the platform, which also includes Riverbed SteelCentral™ for network visibility and control, Riverbed SteelHead™ -- the world’s #1 solution for WAN optimization and application performance – and SD-WAN (software-defined wide-area network) solutions that deliver new levels of business agility.