Riverbed expands remote storage capabilities

IT solutions provider, Riverbed Technology expanded its remote storage capabilities with the introduction of the block-based Riverbed Granite appliance and a new Steelhead model to consolidate remote office servers, storage and applications, SearchStorage reports.

Riverbed split its wide area network (WAN) acceleration Steelhead product into two models, the Steelhead CX and EX.

The CX is targeted at customers who want pure WAN optimisation, while the EX appliance works in tandem with Riverbed Granite to consolidate branch servers and local storage into the data centre.

According to V3.co.uk, while vendors such as Infineta have dabbled in storage applications such as data centre backup and disaster recovery, Riverbed believes there is an opportunity to bring WAN optimisation to everyday storage uses.

Miles Kelly, Riverbed senior director of product marketing, says many customers have expressed the desire to consolidate servers from branch offices within a single data centre. Performance and access worries, however, have left many servers sitting in less secure branch locations.

According to The Register, Riverbed claims it will improve the performance of many of the most commonly used applications across the network, typically between five and 50 times and, in some cases, by up to 100 times. It adds that it will reduce the use of WAN bandwidth by 65% to 95%, relieve network congestion and push out costly network upgrades by two years or more.