Riverbed Technology, the application performance company, has introduced a new release of its Riverbed Granite product family. With expanded capacity and higher performance, IT managers can now extend the benefits of Granite to larger branch offices and data-intensive applications.

Granite is a technology that empowers businesses of all sizes to remove servers and data from branch offices and centralise them in the secure data centre—without sacrificing user experience. This new architectural approach makes it possible to centralise backup operations and get data out of high-risk locations, while increasing agility and lowering the costs of managing remote office IT. To succeed in this dynamic environment, IT leaders need agility, security and control, while business users demand performance. Granite delivers these benefits in a single solution.

This announcement includes new Granite 2.5 software that adds support for fibre channel to its existing iSCSI support, enabling Granite solutions to now support over 90% of the current enterprise-class storage array market. Granite 2.5 also improves data protection with automated snapshots and simplified support for existing data-centre 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.

The performance of Granite 2.5 can be further enhanced with the addition of the 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 centre.

Granite 2.5 and the Steelhead EX 1360 model appliance together deliver an enterprise-class solution for server and data consolidation that allow organisations to deploy any application to any location with high performance and reliability.

“Data growth and infrastructure shifts continue to hamper IT’s ability to meet all protection, retention and compliance requirements. Addressing all these data protection challenges, requires an holistic approach,” says ESG founder and senior analyst Steve Duplessie.

“Silos in technology add to the cost and complexity while reducing productivity and increasing risk of data loss. IT needs to give end users the tools they need to be successful while IT keeps oversight and control.”

Extended integration

Granite 2.5 software adds fibre channel support for the virtual Granite Core that extends integration with enterprise-class storage arrays, including those from EMC, NetApp and IBM. Leading analysts have found that nearly 70% of enterprises deploy fibre channel-based external disk solutions in 2013.

Many organisations choose to deploy Fibre Channel-based storage solutions for their high speed, low latency transport capabilities and abilities to interconnect multiple storage devices to better use and share the storage within the data centre. The addition of fibre channel storage solutions support to the already supported iSCSI in the data centre means over 90% of the current enterprise-class storage array market is now supported by Granite solutions, providing greater flexibility for enterprises to meet the storage consolidation needs of branch offices with larger data sets.

“We see the expanded flexibility of Granite 2.5 in the data centre as a big win – both from a storage and a data protection standpoint,” says Mike Rinken, director of information technology at Mazzetti, an engineering design and consulting firm.

“In our business where large CAD files have been moving toward a more collaborative parametric modeling data set, more resources for Granite Edge appliances make perfect sense. We can consolidate even more data and still make sure branch users get the local performance they need to be effective. We’re excited to have the flexibility of utilising fibre channel storage and how Riverbed is extending their storage footprint by offering more robust devices.”

Simplification of backup and recovery

By consolidating data out of the branch and into the data centre, Granite enables organisations to eliminate branch backup and recovery systems, shifting data protection operations to the secure data centre and leaving data protection to skilled storage personnel. Granite 2.5 further simplifies data protection through enhanced support of industry-leading backup and recovery software solutions like Symantec NetBackup. Granite 2.5 also offers an enhanced centralised management user interface and simplified scheduling of hourly, daily or weekly application snapshots executed in the branch office and captured in the data centre.

As a result, Granite 2.5 delivers a single point of management for branch snapshot schedules simplifying data protection, resulting in improved recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO).

“We’ve deployed Granite to help us manage our data and applications centrally and eliminate the hardware footprint at our data-intensive branches, which has translated to cost savings for us,” says Rohit Tellis, director of information technology at Alamos Gold, a Canadian-based gold producer with exploration and development activities around the globe.

“The data protection enhancements help even further and will give us the assurance that our centralised backup process is easy to manage.”