Integrated with enterprise private data center storage
Cloud storage can be utilized for backup and tiering purposes.

Riverbed Technology announced that it is expanding the application of its industry-leading hyper-converged solution, Riverbed SteelFusion, to cloud environments, and has begun supporting Azure via Microsoft StoreSimple and Amazon Web Services via AWS Storage Gateway. Through this, Riverbed has been able to provide customers with greater flexibility and choice regarding remote cloud-based storage, and enterprises can utilize the cloud for capacity expansion, secondary storage tiers for backup, and tiering linked with private data center storage assets.

Paul O'Farrell, Senior Vice President overseeing Riverbed Steelhead, SteelFusion, and SD-WAN solutions, said, “We are now providing SteelFusion customers with richer options and flexibility through Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services to store remote data in the cloud.” He added, “Companies are already using hybrid IT models by storing data in both the cloud and data centers, and now that cloud-based storage and backup are possible with SteelFusion, they can easily utilize the cloud as a secondary storage tier without impacting branch users.”

The performance improvements for this SteelFusion product are based on SteelFusion 4.0, which was released last April with a newly updated and redesigned hardware platform for better scalability and performance enhancement. Last November, support for SteelFusion for customers using VMware vSphere 6 was announced. Now, by expanding the SteelFusion ecosystem with industry-leading cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft, Riverbed is providing customers with the convenience of accessing cloud-based storage, backup, and tiering capabilities from a single location. This eliminates the need for customers to place costly physical servers in remote locations.

Reduce remote management operating costs, improve data security
Productivity improvements of up to 100 times

Colm Keegan, Senior Analyst for Cloud at the Enterprise Strategy Group, commented, “SteelFusion provides an easy way to rapidly deploy virtualized computing resources to branch offices and remote locations with a single hyper-converged appliance.” He added, “With SteelFusion, branch offices remain under operational control from the central data center and can perform data transfer, backup, and recovery tasks with remarkable speed; now, these capabilities are conveniently available in the cloud without the need for assistance from branch operations personnel.”

Unlike hyper-converged solutions designed to simplify data center infrastructure, SteelFusion is designed for the “hyper-converged edge (branch/remote locations).” SteelFusion can simultaneously meet the critical requirements of business units, IT organizations, and employees by reducing remote management and operational costs, enhancing data security, and improving business continuity and IT agility. In particular, productivity improvements can be expected, with recovery speeds becoming 100 times faster, branch service and site implementation speeds increasing by 30 times, and application performance at branch locations improving by up to 100 times.

The Riverbed Application Performance Platform™ provides CIOs with enterprise-wide end-to-end visibility, optimization, and control. Riverbed SteelFusion is a core component of this platform. In addition, this platform includes Riverbed SteelCentral for network visibility and control, Riverbed Steelhead, the world's number one solution for WAN optimization and application performance, and SD-WAN (Software Defined Wideband Network), which provides a new level of business agility.