Summary

Business Overview

Resources

• Now you could have lower IT costs and fewer management headaches, and happy and productive end-users. How? Consolidate your data centers.

  “Riverbed was the best technology choice for us to complete our data consolidation project worldwide.”
  — Adam Rasner, Director of Corporate Networking, Rayonier

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  • Infrastructure Centralization

    Consolidate infrastructure from branch offices into data centers

    For various reasons, application infrastructure has found its way into makeshift server closets and micro-data centers in branch offices at many organizations. This decentralized approach has led to overly complex operations and inefficiencies. Centralizing application infrastructure reduces the complexity of branch IT infrastructure and improves security and data protection practices. It also allows IT to take advantage of even greater cost efficiencies at data centers.

    Riverbed solutions deliver a comprehensive approach to consolidating branch office infrastructure, including optimizing WAN links to centralized applications, projecting centralized data to support edge applications, and prioritizing WAN traffic between branches and central data centers.

    • With Steelhead^® appliances, customers can centralize applications and improve application response time across the WAN by as much as 100 times, while reducing bandwidth utilization by 50-90 percent.
    • With Granite^® products, customers can reduce branch storage costs by up to 50 percent by fully virtualizing edge servers and storage, consolidating to the data center, and projecting data and applications to edge locations as if they were local
    • With Riverbed quality of service (QoS), customers can allocate bandwidth and prioritize centralized applications based on their latency sensitivity

    

    Figure 1: Riverbed solutions provide key enabling technologies for enterprise-wide consolidation between data centers, from remote locations, and within branch offices.

  • Data Center Consolidation

    Data center consolidation projects may reduce operating costs, but they often cause disruptions and performance problems that frustrate users. Riverbed solutions help organizations understand their IT assets and their dependencies, seamlessly redirect users to consolidated facilities, and improve the performance of network infrastructure to compensate for problems induced by “chatty” protocols operating over long distances.

    Three steps for data center consolidation:

    Identify service dependencies and accelerate consolidation efforts. Riverbed Cascade^® application-aware network performance management products map global IT environments to reduce risk of data center migrations and network outages by highlighting application dependencies.

    Deploy applications with greater flexibility and reliability. Riverbed Stingray™ Traffic Manager software allows organizations to shift application resources between locations, manage and upgrade underlying infrastructure, and distribute application load between multiple servers and data centers, all without impacting end-user access to applications.

    Optimize data center locations. With Riverbed Steelhead^® solutions, organizations can relocate distributed IT infrastructure to more efficient centralized data centers while preserving performance by reducing network traffic by up to 95% and speeding applications up to 100 times faster to LAN-like speeds.

  • Branch Services Consolidation

    Even though a company consolidates IT infrastructure to simplify management, lower costs, and improve data protection, some services still need to be delivered locally. With Riverbed solutions, organizations can leverage virtualization technologies and consolidate these services to eliminate redundant servers, and further reduce hardware, software, and maintenance costs and IT complexity.

    Centralization without compromising performance
    Steelhead and Granite™ products enable IT organizations to overcome application performance challenges of centralized applications by improving WAN performance and end-user experience for numerous applications.

    Branch office box for streamlined branch infrastructure
    Customers can run multiple virtual instances on the Steelhead EX appliance with VSP, enabling customers to consolidate multiple local services in the branch such as print, DNS and DHCP.

    Visibility to the edge
    Native capabilities and integration with Cascade® application-aware network performance monitoring solutions combine to make Steelhead appliances a powerful visibility platform in branch locations. Full integration with Wireshark® enables customers to isolate application specific issues and even replay application transactions.

    

    Figure 1: Riverbed solutions provides key enabling technologies for enterprise-wide consolidation between data centers, from remote locations, and within branch offices.

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• Organizations are pursuing enterprise-wide consolidation for many reasons, including cost efficiency, manageability, security, resiliency, and flexibility:

  • Cost efficiency: By consolidating under-utilized and distributed assets, organizations can reduce infrastructure, administration, and power and cooling costs
  • Manageability: By consolidating data centers, servers, storage, desktops, and branch office infrastructure, businesses can reduce the number of sites and hardware to manage, while more easily applying automation policies
  • Security: Better management of infrastructure is essential to improving security. Security policies are easier to implement on centralized and consolidated systems.
  • Resiliency: Consolidating infrastructure allows for streamlined data protection procedures for disaster recovery and business continuity
  • Flexibility: As organizations consolidate infrastructure and adopt virtualized deployment paradigms, provisioning new services and locations, as well as adding scale to existing applications, adds minimal cost overhead and requires less administration
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• Resources

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  • Analyst Reports

    • EMA: Riverbed Advances Visibility into Virtual Data Centers
    • EMA: Riverbed Cascade First to Embrace VXLAN Performance Monitoring
    • ESG Lab Report: Riverbed Steelhead EX + Granite
    • Forrester: Branch Consolidation
    • Forrester: Successfully Consolidating Branch Infrastructure
    • Gartner Report: Plan Now For the Hyperconverged Enterprise Network
    • IDC: Realizing Business Value and ROI with Application-Aware Network Performance Management
    • Taneja: Riverbed Sets a New Standard for WAN Opt
    • ZK Research: WAN Optimization Gives Rise to Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure

  • Article

    • 10 Networking Predictions For 2013
    • Enterprise storage system: 2012 Products of the Year finalists
    • InfoWorld's 2013 Technology of the Year Award winners
    • Riverbed expands support for virtual desktops
    • Why the Network Is Another Big Data Problem

  • Briefs

    • Branch Office Acceleration with WDS
    • Feature Brief: Riverbed Steelhead EX + Granite
    • Solution Brief: Branch Infrastructure Consolidation Solutions
    • Solution Brief: Federal Data Center Consolidation

  • Case Studies

    • Mogul Case Study

  • Chalk Talks

    • Chalk Talk - Private Cloud Consolidation
    • Chalk Talk - Private Cloud Consolidation

  • Consolidation & Virtualization Web Seminars

    • 5 Ways to Keep the Heart of Your IT Beating Strong in 2013
    • 5 Ways to Keep the Heart of Your IT Beating Strong in 2013
    • Elevating Your Consolidation Strategy to the Next Level
    • Five Missteps That Can Put Your Project at Risk
    • IT Nirvana: It's a Quick Consolidation of Your Infrastructure Away
    • IT Nirvana: It's a Quick Consolidation of Your Infrastructure Away

  • Customer Stories

    • GeoEngineers consolidates servers and backup with Granite

  • Customer Stories Podcasts

    • Granite Infographic

  • Data & Spec Sheets

    • Riverbed Granite Datasheet
    • Steelhead + Granite Spec Sheet
    • Steelhead EX + Granite Data Sheet
    • Steelhead Family Brochure
    • Stingray Application Firewall Brochure

  • Documents

    • Hyperconvergence Infographic

  • Product Demos

    • Cascade Jack Demo

  • WAN Optimization Web Seminars

    • Enhance Your Riverbed Deployment: Fall 2012
    • Get the Most Out of Your Riverbed Deployment: Summer 2013
    • Maximize Your Riverbed Deployment and Consolidation: An Online Workshop
    • Reimagine Your Network: Modernize and Get Competitive
    • Simplify, Accelerate, and Consolidate, from the Branch to the Datacenter
    • Two Simple Steps to Successful Data Center Consolidation

  • Web Seminars

    • Consolidation in the Age of Cloud
    • Consolidation Without Compromise - Part 1 - Data Center Consolidation
    • Consolidation Without Compromise - Part 2 - Remote Office Simplification
    • Consolidation Without Compromise - Part 3 - Data Centralization
    • Consolidation Without Compromise - Part 4 - Cloud Integration
    • Consolidation Without Compromise - Part 5 - Performance Management
    • Get More From Your Riverbed Deployment with FlyScript Developer Tools
    • The Next Phase of IT Consolidation

  • White Papers

    • 5 Steps to Successful IT Consolidation and Virtualization
    • Branch Office Enablement Solution with IBM Storage Systems and Riverbed Granite Technologies
    • CIO Guide to Advanced Consolidation
    • Four Missing Components that Put Your Data Center Consolidation/Migration Project at Risk
    • Granite Use Case Technical Brief
    • IDG whitepaper - Data Center Transformation
    • Mitigating the Risks of IT Change
    • Steelhead EX + Granite ROI Scenarios
    • WAN Optimization: The Key to Effective Private Clouds
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Customer Stories & Endorsements

• Aurecon

  

• Constangy, Brooks & Smith

  

• Lantmannen

  

• Aguirre Newman

  

• GeoEngineers

  

• GT Conveyor

  

• Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)

  

• Jefferies & Company