Enabling Zero IT at the Branch
Without teaching the masses to suck eggs, you'll know that Riverbed SteelFusion is a Hyper Converged Infrastructure solution (compute, RAM, storage and WAN optimisation in a box) ideal for businesses who still have applications, data and backup at remote sites that they really would like to have in the Data Centre (for compliance, ease of management, DR and DC) but can't due to bandwidth issues, chunky applications, the need for site resilience etc.
Unlike replication technologies brought by other "Converged Infrastructure" appliances, with Riverbed SteelFusion, data synchronises between the edge and the core (and actually lives at the core). The SteelFusion appliances at the edge have enough grunt to run a decent set of apps and services out on the edge inside ESX based virtual machines. Storage (that runs the apps and OS) on the edge point at LUNs in the data centre, and those LUNs reside on whatever SAN you choose - making compatible and supported by anyone no matter what your DC architecture is.
It's just got better - with SteelFusion 4.0
In the early hours of this morning (UK time) Riverbed released SteelFusion 4.0 which advances this by adding support for the latest version of ESXi into the mix, so that edge locations can operate virtual machines on bare metal instead of messing about with operating systems to host hypervisors and all from the comfort of their VMware vCentre.
Riverbed have also increased the hardware in the edge, supporting more CPU cores (up to 20 now). RAM support has also been double (now up to 256GB) which was a limiting factor previously for some of our customers - more RAM means more VMs and faster everything.
Storage is now tiered, with more flash in the appliance so that frequently-accessed data gets delivered faster (great for disk intensive apps such as VDI for example) Storage tiering also helps with data synchronisation meaning that the files and other stuff that users need to access at the edge is pushed to remote SteelFusions whilst other stuff stays back on the SANs in the data centres. As before, customers can also do file and print services at the edge, with local storage doing the heavy grunt work - its all about improving application performance to the user.
Failover can now span multiple data centres: if your core SteelFusion appliance (virtual or physical) goes down, we can switch to another in a second DC or to a virtual SteelFusion in the cloud.
So never a better time to talk to us about Riverbed SteelFusion. After all, no business really want to manage local IT, data, back-up and DR at the edge sites, and at the same time no one wants slow apps.
http://www.cisilion.com/riverbed-premier-partner