Riverbed Granite: New Name, Emphasis on Converged Infrastructure

Riverbed Technology (RVBD) is putting a new name to its server consolidation technology and adding a few bells and whistles.

Riverbed Granite has been renamed SteelFusion to better reflect its place in the converged architecture environment, said Eric Carter, director of Product Marketing.

“[The new name was] in part to represent the infrastructure convergence happening in the marketplace with Vblocks, FlexPods and the like,” Carter said. “When you look at that and then what Granite has been doing, it looks a lot like that.”

To refresh, the SteelFusion solution is made up of two appliances—SteelFusion Edge and SteelFusion Core—that work in tandem to better enable companies to push their branch office (edge) servers offsite to the data center (core), yet still have the same quality of service an on-premise server delivers.

“SteelFusion Edge combines server/compute with storage and virtualization, which isn’t different from other companies. What is different is this concept of sucking data back in to the data center and pushing it back out,” Carter said. “When data is centralized I don’t need a backup solution—this solution can deduplicate and block-level cache and pre-fetch.

“Just imagine the really great conversations that VARs integrators and those helping customers can have,” he added. “We want the market to recognize while everyone is hot on converged infrastructure, this is about delivering convergence simplicity with adding value. We can set the standard there.”

SteelFusion 3.0 has been updated to include scale and performance enhancements for faster local performance for storage-intensive workloads such as virtual desktop infrastructure and CAD/CAM applications, according to the company. What’s more, the solution offers three times data capacity, supporting up to 100TB of consolidated data.

Also, the updated solution now includes support for NetApp cluster mode and EMC VNX2 snapshots—“SteelFusion can consolidate data to that and manage point-in-time snapshot reports,” Carter said.
Carter noted converged infrastructure solves the problems of dealing with disparate technologies, which is why the technology is becoming so popular among enterprises and even small to midsize companies.

“Customers don’t want to manage islands of IT,” he said. “Solutions such as Vblock and FlexPod tend to be data center-focused and kind of expensive to deploy in the branch. They also aren’t quite the same as what we are proposing here. Just by our nature of focusing on the branch we set ourselves apart.”

SteelFusion is slated to be available in early May, according to Riverbed.