Riverbed Granite In Action

"It does what...?"

I've heard this double-take question more than once as we describe what Riverbed Granite is able to do.  The innovation sometimes takes a minute to sink in.  "Separate storage from compute?  Solve the problem at the block-level? What does that mean anyway?"  What it means is that Riverbed customers have a new arrow in their consolidation quiver.  

By delivering the breakthrough of accelerating at the block-level across the WAN, Granite enables organizations to do things they couldn't do before. We sometimes have described Granite as being able to "consolidate the un-consolidatable."  And its true.  Anyone who has found themselves shackled by requirements for servers in the branch because of the need for local block-storage access should keep reading. In the remainder of this entry I will highlight examples of Granite in action.  In other words - let me give a few use cases - and hopefully if you've got anything considered "un-consolidatable" you'll see how Granite - and the new Edge-VSI approach can help you.

Consolidate and Control

Imagine a growing business - one that is generating a lot of data with custom applications that are running in global locations. You're happy to be growing, but you're left managing servers in places you never thought you'd visit. Ever. You've got valuable data "assets" in locations that lets say are a bit on the sketchy side.  But business is business. Can't strip out the servers/storage or else business can't flow - or can it?  Granite's unique capability to project block-level storage from the data center to the edge means you CAN CONTROL the data in the data center, and run virtualized instances of your branch-bound applications at the edge. Every single block of data is managed on your enterprise-class storage area network (SAN) in the data center even though it is serving the needs of far flung branches. Go and Grow - your concerns about where that data is are alleviated. You know where it is. You control it.

Consolidate and Simplify

What about management? We've heard from many customers about the cost and effort of managing the remaining infrastructure in the branch - servers, storage, backup. Granite and the concept of Edge-VSI make it possible to establish a "stateless" branch office in the sense that virtualized applications can run on compute in the branch but data stores are located within and managed from the data center. Here your business can Grow as you Go.  A site can easily connect a VM to a Granite "projected" storage LUN from the data center.  Size it for today.  Need more space in the future?  Expand the LUN at the data center and the branch gets more space - just like that.  No need to fly in to install new hard drives.  

Consolidate and Protect

Backup in the branch. It's not really your ideal scenario, but the data is there so you've mapped out how to make sure it's protected. Maybe it's a tape backup once every 24 hours - sent back to HQ - and recovery is that in reverse. Or maybe you backup over the WAN. In either case there's the added expense and worry of setting up the infrastructure, managing it - and hoping for the best. With Granite, data that was once thousands of miles away is now within your enterprise SAN - a very well qualified "offsite location". In the data center it can be protected with your mature data center data protection practices. It's much easier to move beyond once-a-day recovery points to something more frequent. Pair that with youre already-established replication between data centers and you've got full fledged enterprise-class protection for that data that was once somewhere "out there." You can restore in a number of ways. Catastrophic loss in the branch? Set up a new Granite Edge and reconnect to the data center. Or restore at a more granular level and stream back to the branch on demand. Even if your active branch doesn't quite appreciate the new level of protection, they will be very happy with faster restores.

Hopefully these use cases illuminate for you what we mean when we say that Granite enables a new architectural approach to consolidation. It is of course exciting to launch a new technology in the marketplace - and we at Riverbed are equally excited for you to try Granite for yourself to see the possibilities it can bring to your business.