Branch offices are the front lines of business. They need to be nimble and more than ever must be connected. These offices also store a lot of data that needs to be shared with the corporate headquarters. While the branch office data may not always be mission critical it is often business critical, and IT is under ever increasing pressure to meet strict recovery point and recovery time objectives for these offices. If there is a disruption, the branch needs to be able to continue operations and be reconnected to the main data center as quickly as possible.
Meeting these new objectives is becoming increasingly difficult. It seems that every remote office has a unique application that it needs to run locally for the best performance. Also, users need local access to data and, just like headquarters employees, they want to access that data from any device. The vendor community has raced to fill this need by creating servers, storage and data protection solutions aimed specifically at the branch office use case. The problem is that all of these unique applications and devices simply make IT’s job even more challenging than it was before.
Zero Branch IT
Riverbed is addressing these requirements with its “Zero Branch IT” initiative through their SteelFusion architecture. Riverbed’s goal with SteelFusion is to eliminate the need for specialized servers, storage and data protection by providing a platform that can be instantly provisioned and recovered, but with full data security and complete IT visibility.
SteelFusion Architecture
The SteelFusion architecture consists of two main components: the SteelFusion Edge appliance and the SteelFusion Core. The SteelFusion Edge is a hyper-converged architecture purpose built for branch IT needs, providing virtual compute services, local storage and branch connectivity. These edge devices sync to the SteelFusion Core, that resides at the main data center and becomes the central repository for all branch data.
Keeping The Branch Up and Running
The weakest link in remote office IT is the connectivity between sites. WAN links go down and many sites can’t justify redundant links. If connectivity to the main site is lost the remote site has almost everything it needs to maintain operations, local virtualized servers and a copy of the most recently accessed/modified data.
In the event of a branch office failure, services started in the main data center can instantiate the remote site’s applications as virtual machines, and the data being modified by the branch is constantly synced to the primary. If the branch office is expected to have a sustained outage, that remote’s data can be pushed to another branch and re-instantiated there.
SteelFusion 4.0 and FusionSync
SteelFusion 4.0 significantly increases the processing capabilities of the branch office appliances. It provides the ability to run 2.5X the number of virtual machines and delivers 10X more IOPS for more rapid storage I/O. It also delivers a new software capability, FusionSync, that reduces risk even further.
FusionSync provides instant Branch Continuity in the event of either a main data center failure or loss of connectivity, allowing the edge device to sync with two data centers. If connectivity or an entire data center fails, the edge device can automatically fail over to the secondary data center.
StorageSwiss Take
There are plenty of solutions that provide compute, storage and connectivity to remote offices. But most of them proliferate the number of branch office devices that need to be managed, making branch office IT even more complex. SteelFusion converges the branch office requirements into a single device that provides virtual compute services, local storage and advanced WAN connectivity. SteelFusion also makes data protection easier since data either resides in the primary data center or is quickly synced with it. For organizations with remote offices Riverbed fills the gap with a solution that centralizes branch IT, but still allows the branch to be a branch.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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