OREANDA-NEWS. February 11, 2016. Riverbed Technology, the leader in application performance infrastructure, today announced Riverbed SteelFusion 4.2 will support VMware vSphere 6. The support for VMware vSphere in SteelFusion 4.2 builds upon the long-standing partnership between the two companies, delivering superior business agility, information security and application performance to mutual customers across their remote and branch office (ROBO) locations.

Riverbed SteelFusion is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that centralizes 100% of data and physical servers from remote sites into data centers without compromising local performance and availability of applications at ROBO locations. This enables IT to extend the security, resiliency and efficiency of infrastructure managed in centralized data centers out to every remote location where business is conducted – including regional offices, local stores, banks, manufacturing plants, hospitals, government centers, law firms and other locations – resulting in greater agility, less risk and reduced costs to the business.  Today’s release follows the April SteelFusion 4.0 release, in which the hardware platforms were completely updated and redesigned to deliver increased performance and scalability for remote sites and regional hubs of all sizes.

"As a major broadcast media company, we must always achieve high performance from our ad-serving application running at our remote broadcast stations, or we risk losing a lot of money,” said David Giambruno, CIO at Tribune Media. “As a Riverbed SteelFusion and VMware user, the seamless integration of VMware vSphere into our SteelFusion devices helps us to run an extremely agile IT business, with all operations for this business-critical app being run centrally from our datacenter. As a result of SteelFusion, we have eliminated the infrastructure previously required in our broadcast facilities, and we can quickly and easily provision app updates or entirely new facilities without any compromise to the performance we expect.” 

“IDC recently completed an extensive lab validation of the Riverbed SteelFusion solution, in which we observed its tight integration with the VMware ecosystem, including vSphere and VMware vCenter Server™,” said Rohit Mehra, Vice President, Network Infrastructure, at IDC. "VMware customers using SteelFusion will now have the unique ability to provision new branch services and sites with ease and agility, directly from a centralized data center without affecting user experience in remote locations. IDC also believes VMware Horizon running on SteelFusion is a notable differentiating feature that increases business agility.”

“As a longtime VMware partner, our mutual customers can feel confident when a new version of vSphere is released,” said Paul O’Farrell, Senior Vice President and General Manager, SteelHead and SteelFusion, at Riverbed. “The latest release of Riverbed SteelFusion 4.2 with VMware vSphere 6 is a testament of our ongoing collaboration with VMware, as Riverbed pushes the boundaries of hyper-converged technology to the edge, delivering on the promise of zero branch IT.”

"Riverbed and VMware have partnered closely over the years to provide our customers with IT infrastructure that is flexible and easy to use. Our partnership and support from Riverbed provides a powerful platform that can exceed our mutual customers’ business needs," said Howard Hall, Senior Director, Global Technology Partner Organization, VMware. "With SteelFusion and VMware vSphere 6, the leading virtualization platform, branch offices are empowered to increase agility without compromising user productivity."

Availability

SteelFusion 4.2 will be available in November.  

Riverbed is a premier sponsor of the VMUG Virtual Event 3.0 and is hosting a customer panel discussion with Mazzetti Inc. and Northwest Pipe Company, on November 9, 2015 at 10:40am CT, titled: Hyper-Convergence Extended Beyond the Hype: To the Branch.

Riverbed SteelFusion and the Riverbed Application Performance Management Platform™

The Riverbed Application Performance Platform™ gives CIOs end-to-end visibility, optimization and control across an entire enterprise.  A key part of the platform, Riverbed SteelFusion is the first and only hyper-converged infrastructure solution that enables zero IT at the branch. SteelFusion consolidates 100% of data and servers out of branches and into the datacenter where it can be properly secured, managed and protected, while ensuring fast local performance of branch applications and services.  SteelFusion extends the full power, security and resiliency of the datacenter out to each branch site resulting in complete data security, increased business agility and superior business continuity.