Riverbed Releases New Granite Product Family; Introduces New Architectural Approach to Achieve Complete IT Consolidation

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Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure Extends the Boundaries of the Data Center to the Edge of the Enterprise

Dubai, United Arab Emirates., February 8, 2012 - (PressReleasePoint) -

February 08, 2012 –Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT performance company, announced a new architectural approach called edge virtual server infrastructure (edge-VSI) that does for edge servers what virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) did for desktops:  it allows IT to consolidate and manage all edge servers in the data center. But unlike VDI, edge-VSI does this while delivering 20-50% lower total cost of ownership (TCO).Riverbed® Granite^TM is the revolutionary new product that enables edge-VSI. With Granite, global enterprises can achieve complete consolidation of edge applications, servers and storage to the data center, while delivering services to the edge of the enterprise as if they were local. Edge-VSI is complementary to wide area network (WAN) optimization, accelerating performance for applications and use cases not addressed by any WAN optimization approach today.
Granite does what was previously thought impossible:  it allows storage to be decoupled from its server over thousands of miles—and actually work as if the storage were local to the server.  The user gets uncompromised performance, while IT is able to manage, backup, provision, patch, expand, and protect the data for its far-flung enterprise all within the four walls of the data center. Organizations that deploy Granite are expected to save up to 50% over traditional approaches to managing distributed infrastructure by eliminating costly backup and recovery processes in remote locations, consolidating underutilized edge servers and storage, and cutting many of the general IT administration costs including travel associated with managing infrastructure at the edge.
Introducing Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure:  Addressing Performance Beyond the Application Level
Thousands of organizations globally have benefitted by deploying WAN optimization for a variety of reasons: application acceleration, consolidation, bandwidth savings and business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR). However, for many organizations committed to complete consolidation of global infrastructure, a few servers often remain in the branch. Granite was developed to allow organizations to remove those remaining servers and achieve complete consolidation.
The demands of custom and write-intensive applications in the branch, the need to work with large data-sets that defy existing WAN optimization techniques and the concern of user productivity in the face of WAN outages have forced businesses to maintain costly storage and application servers at the edge of the enterprise, increasing IT footprint and introducing administration and infrastructure overhead.
 
Granite solves bandwidth and latency problems over distributed networks, but lower in the technology stack – at the block level – making it possible to deliver global storage and server infrastructure extended from the data center over the WAN. By adding file system intelligence to the block layer, it, among other things, parallelizes interactions between server and storage that were otherwise sequential. This innovation means that distributed data and servers can now reside in one place and the performance for users at the edge will not be impacted, all while eliminating up to 50% of the costs associated with managing distributed infrastructure.
Granite requires two components: Granite Core, a physical or virtual appliance in the data center, and Granite Edge, a service running on a Steelhead® EX in the branch office. By combining Steelhead EX + Granite, organizations can take advantage of greater consolidation and centralization with a powerful combination of WAN optimization, virtual services platform and innovative block-storage optimization. Alternatively, Granite Edge is available as a standalone appliance.
 
 
Availability
Granite is expected to be generally available this quarter.