9.19.16
Riverbed Technology, the application performance company, today announced it is offering Riverbed® SteelFusion™ in new cloud and virtual deployment options for greater customer choice and flexibility. SteelFusion, the leading software-defined edge solution, allows organizations to centralize distributed ROBO (remote office and brand office) IT infrastructure and operations in a data center, the cloud, or a hybrid combination for better management, security, agility, and cost-effectiveness.
The new cloud and virtual deployment options include:
• SteelFusion availability on IBM Cloud, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud platform and fully dedicated, bare-metal cloud infrastructure for the enterprise. In addition, SteelFusion now supports IBM Spectrum Accelerate, a software-defined storage (SDS) solution for building enterprise private cloud storage with commodity server hardware. Customers now have a choice of centralizing edge IT in their own data center, in the cloud, or across a hybrid combination. Riverbed partners will no longer need to go through a data center for SteelFusion with IBM Cloud.
• Virtual SteelFusion Edge, delivering complete software-defined edge capabilities in a virtual form factor capable of running on any server hardware that meets required specifications. This provides customers the flexibility to deploy SteelFusion on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) server hardware, with the ability to deploy an edge IT solution that best meets their business needs and IT standards. Virtual SteelFusion Edge is targeted to be available to select Riverbed partners in q4 of 2016, including Avnet, who intends to offer fully integrated systems that include Virtual SteelFusion Edge by the end of 2016.
“Riverbed is pleased to offer new cloud and virtual options with SteelFusion, providing customers with the flexibility they need when deploying and managing operations at the edge in today’s hybrid IT landscape,” said Paul O’Farrell, Senior Vice President and General Manager of SteelHead, SteelFusion and SteelConnect at Riverbed. “Businesses can now centralize apps, data, infrastructure and IT services in any combination of private, public, and hybrid clouds, and deliver them securely to users anywhere across the edge with optimized performance. With our unique software-defined edge approach, Riverbed is transforming edge IT by allowing organizations to centralize operations, improve information security, and maximize employee productivity at remote locations.”
This announcement builds on the last SteelFusion release in March, which enabled cloud-based data storage – with support for Azure through Microsoft StorSimple and Amazon Web Services through AWS Storage Gateway –across remote locations for added capacity and backup. Now, SteelFusion is further expanding upon its cloud integrations with support for the enterprise cloud platform, IBM Cloud.
“IBM and Riverbed have a long history of successful partnering to provide our clients with IT infrastructure that is flexible and easy to manage,” said Mac Devine, VP & CTO of Emerging Technology & Advanced Innovation at IBM. “We are excited to leverage Riverbed’s technology to allow our customers to optimize remote and branch office IT operations in the cloud. With SteelFusion and IBM Cloud enterprise platform, our mutual customers can extend the hybrid cloud ecosystem to the branch office. This provides clients with the ability to orchestrate a software-defined edge solution in the cloud for increased agility, security and cost savings at the edge.”
Further enhancing the flexibility of SteelFusion, Avnet intends to help solution providers and their customers achieve a software-defined edge by delivering a fully integrated system to meet specific deployment requirements at remote sites.
“Working with Riverbed to offer Virtual SteelFusion Edge on solutions built by Avnet will give Avnet partners new capabilities to meet their customers’ business and infrastructure needs at edge locations,” said Cheryl Neal, vice president, Data and Networking, Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas. “Partners will be able to use this offering to build customized software-defined edge solutions for their customers on industry-standard servers. At the same time, partners will be able to rely on Avnet’s solutions specialist approach and highly experienced integration services team to provide complete solutions that are ready to be deployed for their customers.”
Riverbed® SteelFusion™ delivers unprecedented simplicity, agility, data security, and business continuity to distributed enterprises. SteelFusion enables a software-defined edge by bringing together best-of-breed virtualization, intelligent storage caching, and industry-leading WAN optimization into a single hyper-converged infrastructure solution that meets both the needs of the enterprise for low operational costs, high security, and fast business agility as well as the needs of branch employees for high-performing applications that simply work. SteelFusion is the only hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed with the unique challenges of edge IT in mind:
• Consolidates server, storage, backup infrastructure into a single appliance and removes data from edge locations without any compromise to application performance
• Consolidates and accelerates time-consuming edge IT operations, such as backup 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 data center and the cloud out to all edge locations, regardless of distance, and without compromising performance
