Riverbed Granite

The Riverbed Technology company specializing in productivity solutions of IT infrastructure announced the solution Riverbed Granite which implements the new architectural approach carrying the name of a peripheral virtual server framework (edge-VSI) at the beginning of 2012. As explained in Riverbed, infrastructure of edge-VSI provides concerning peripheral servers of an opportunity, infrastructures of virtual desktops (VDI), comparable with opportunities, for desktops: it allows IT departments to consolidate all peripheral servers in a data processing center and thus to manage them. However unlike VDI, infrastructure of edge-VSI allows to achieve this result at simultaneous reduction of total ownership cost for 20%-50%, says the company.

Using Riverbed Granite the global enterprises can consolidate completely peripheral applications, servers and storage systems in DPC, at the same time to provide delivery of services to enterprise peripheries as though they were local. At the same time the architecture of edge-VSI supplements the solution for optimization of WAN — it helps to increase performance of applications and can be used for the solution of such tasks which are not solved today by any other approach to optimization of WAN, claim in Riverbed.

According to developers, Granite allows to untie a storage system and the server and to place them at distance in thousands of kilometers from each other, at the same time all infrastructure will work as though the storage system was near the server. Thus, the user receives the uncompromising performance while IT employees will be able to manage a storage system, to perform backup, to provide, switch and protect data of the distributed enterprise, and all this in DPC. By calculations of Riverbed, the organizations using Granite will be able to receive economy to 50% in comparison with traditional approaches to management of a distributed infrastructure due to failure from expensive processes of backup and data recovery at remote offices and also due to consolidation of not completely used peripheral servers and storage systems. Besides, Granite allows to reduce many administrative IT expenses, including the traveling expenses connected with infrastructure management on the periphery.

Requirements of customized applications with high intensity of write operations which are used in branches and also need of work with large volumes of data throw down a challenge to the existing optimization methods of WAN, and the aspiration to provide high productivity of users even in case of failure in WAN network forces the enterprises to contain expensive storage systems and application servers on the periphery that increases expenses on IT and leads to additional administrative and infrastructure costs. The solution Granite is designed to solve problems with capacity and cross-network delays on the distributed networks, but at lower, block level, allowing to use, thus, a global storage system and a server framework from DPC on WAN network. Due to the built-in support of file systems (file system intelligence) at the block level this solution, in addition, allows to parallelize interaction between the server and a storage system which otherwise would be performed consistently. This innovation means that the distributed data and servers can be placed in the same place, and it will not affect employees productivity, being in filial divisions, explained in Riverbed.

Work of Granite requires two components: Granite Core — the physical or virtual device in a data processing center and Granite Edge — the service started on the Steelhead EX device in filial division. According to in Riverbed, using the Steelhead EX device together with the Granite platform, the organizations can achieve higher consolidation and centralization of infrastructure due to effective optimization of WAN, use of the platform of virtual services and the innovation optimization of block storage systems. Granite Edge is also available in the form of the independent device. The solution will go on sale current quarter.