Riverbed Technology announced Riverbed SteelFusion 3.0 (formerly known as Riverbed Granite), the first branch converged infrastructure that centralizes data in the datacenter and delivers local performance and nearly instant recovery at the branch.

SteelFusion fuses branch servers, storage, networking, and virtualization infrastructure into a single solution that, as measured by Taneja Group, reduces the average time to provision branch services by 30x (from five hours to ten minutes) and recovery from branch outages by 96x (from 24 hours to 15 minutes). With SteelFusion 3.0, Riverbed raises the bar with even faster branch recovery, higher data capacity, and faster performance.

The typical datacenter 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. 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 Riverbed Granite, now called Riverbed SteelFusion. To date, the solution is helping customers centralize and protect an estimated 47 petabytes of branch data in their datacenter and consolidate an estimated 87,000 branch servers. SteelFusion has been named InfoWorld Technology of the Year for two straight years.

“With more and more branches and data, organizations are struggling with the cost and inefficiency of managing islands of infrastructure – servers, apps and storage – outside the datacenter. Riverbed developed the first solution that delivers all the benefits of converged infrastructure found in the datacenter, such as performance, security, scalability, better disaster recovery, and manageability, but optimized for the unique requirements of the branch,” said John Martin, SVP and GM, Storage Delivery at Riverbed. “With SteelFusion, Riverbed has completely changed the game with branch IT infrastructure. Businesses get the best of both worlds: centralizing data to eliminate branch downtime, improve data security, and lower TCO while still delivering local access to apps and data for branch workers.”

With the SteelFusion 3.0 release, Riverbed delivers:

- 6x performance gain in the branch with a new high-end appliance. With a 6x performance gain over the previous high-end SteelFusion appliance, the new SteelFusion 1360P appliance ensures users get faster, local performance for storage-intensive workloads like Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and CAD/CAM applications.

- 3x increase in data-capacity at the datacenter with a new higher capacity controller appliance. Higher capacity on the storage delivery controller, the SteelFusion Core 3000, means storage admins can now support up to 100TB consolidated data, a 3x improvement over the previous high of 35TB supported. This enables scalability for global enterprise companies looking to consolidate their data and applications.

- Enhanced recovery innovation. A new predictive pre-fetch capability on the converged appliance, the Branch Recovery Agent further reduces recovery time from major outages. This ensures employees can remain productive with constant access to applications and data, despite major disasters.

- Simplified operations. Server, virtualization, and backup administrators will see an improved scale-out architecture with pooled management of storage delivery controllers. A new recovery agent for the converged appliance makes it simpler and faster for administrators to recover a branch from a major outage.

- Even better NetApp and EMC integration. Support for NetApp cluster mode and EMC VNX2 snapshots continue seamless integration advancements to ensure SteelFusion integrates seamlessly with data center SAN infrastructure to provide backup consolidation.

Riverbed SteelFusion is a branch converged infrastructure solution that centralizes data in the datacenter and delivers local performance and nearly instant recovery at the branch. SteelFusion consolidates branch servers, storage, networking and virtualization infrastructure into a single solution. SteelFusion expedites branch office provisioning, backup and recovery and ensures continuous operations when disasters occur from any cause – weather, fire or accident. With SteelFusion, businesses can restore branch operations in a matter of minutes vs. days, centrally protect and secure data in the datacenter and significantly lower the TCO of branch and remote offices.

Riverbed SteelFusion is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform, the most complete platform for location-independent computing that gives companies the flexibility to host applications and data in the locations that best serve the business while ensuring flawless application delivery to better leverage global resources, radically reduce the cost of running their business and maximize employee productivity.

SteelFusion 3.0 is expected to be generally available in early May.