Riverbed Technology introduced an enhanced update to its Granite product family, which enables businesses to remove servers and data from branch offices and centralize them in the secure data center.
Riverbed said the solution has especially gained traction where enterprise branches are in high-risk locations, where there is real threat the company facilities could be tampered with. In such cases, Riverbed can ensure that data is consolidated in a secure data center and only streamed to the branch offices as needed. This also enables organizations to eliminate branch backup and recovery systems.
The latest version of Riverbed Granite delivers expanded capacity and higher performance. New Granite 2.5 software adds support for Fibre Channel to its existing iSCSI support. Granite 2.5 also improves data protection with automated snapshots and simplified support for existing data-center class backup and recovery software. This news builds upon EMC E-Lab qualifying Granite with EMC VMAX in 2012 and the recently completed EMC E-Lab qualification of Granite with EMC VNX in June 2013.
Riverbed is also introducing a new purpose-built Steelhead EX 1360 model appliance on which Granite can be hosted. The Steelhead EX 1360 model appliance offers enterprises greater capacity and performance for consolidating larger data stores back to the data center. In addition, the new Steelhead appliance also enables organizations with larger data workloads to increase the amount of data it can lock within the appliance cache, increasing the ability of branch offices with larger data sets to maintain productivity, even during WAN outages.
Granite 2.5 and Steelhead EX 1360 model appliances are expected to be generally available in Q3 2013.
