Riverbed Technology says that Riverbed® SteelFusion is extending its reach to cloud environments with support for Azure through Microsoft StorSimple and Amazon Web Services through AWS Storage Gateway. Customers now have more flexibility and choice for cloud-based data storage across remote locations and can leverage the cloud as a secondary storage tier for added capacity, backup, or for tiering in conjunction with private data centre storage assets.
“We are excited to give our SteelFusion customers more options and flexibility with the ability to store their remote data in the cloud, whether it be with Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services,” said Paul O’Farrell, Senior Vice President and General Manager of SteelHead, SteelFusion and SD-WAN solutions at Riverbed. “Many of today’s enterprises are already using a hybrid IT model, with data both in the cloud and data centre. Now with access to cloud-based storage and backup capabilities with SteelFusion, our customers can easily leverage the cloud as a secondary storage tier without any impact to users at the edge.”
This announcement builds on the SteelFusion 4.0 release in April 2015 that delivered updated and redesigned hardware platforms to provide increased performance and scalability for remote sites and regional hubs of all sizes. In November, Riverbed announced SteelFusion support for customers using VMware vSphere 6. Now, Riverbed is continuing to expand its SteelFusion ecosystem with leading cloud providers AWS and Microsoft, giving enterprises the additional flexibility to access cloud-based storage, backup, and tiering capabilities from one centralised location – eliminating the need to invest in costly physical servers at remote locations.
“Enterprise Strategy Group is very impressed with SteelFusion’s unique capabilities for greatly simplifying virtualized application management, security and data protection in ROBO (remote office and branch office) locations,” said Colm Keegan, Senior Cloud Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Through a single hyper-converged appliance, SteelFusion provides businesses with an easy way to rapidly deploy virtualized computing resources into ROBOs. The appliance provides all of the application performance, infrastructure scalability and high availability requirements that are needed in branch offices, while enabling centralized IT administrators to manage and centrally backup and protect the critical business data residing on remotely based applications. Through SteelFusion, branches can be spun up, spun down, moved, backed-up, and restored amazingly fast all from the central data centre, and now conveniently in the cloud, without requiring assistance from operational staff in the branch. SteelFusion helps businesses meet the variable application performance requirements of their ROBO locations while reducing complexity and mitigating risk.”