Riverbed Rises to Meet Big Data Challenge

In order to consolidate branch office applications into a centralized data center, organizations need to be able to treat the network as a seamless extension of their storage systems. Otherwise, latency issues will result in a rebellion among rank and file employees, who these days can just as easily contract any number of shadow IT services to fulfill their application needs.

To prevent that scenario from unfolding, Riverbed Technology developed Granite, a way to cache storage I/O requests to centralized storage and eliminate I/O latency issues when users try to access applications residing in a remote data center. In fact, it’s that capability that allows organizations such as Revlon to save millions of dollars by consolidating data centers.

This week, Riverbed extended the capabilities of Granite to include a bigger appliance that can support larger data sets thanks to the introduction of a new Steelhead 1360 appliance and support for Fibre channel connections in addition to iSCSI interfaces.

According to Jerome Noll, cloud storage marketing director for Riverbed, IT organizations want to consolidate branch offices to reduce overall costs more than ever. The challenge is that in the era of Big Data, there will be more latency applications than ever trying to access larger and more numerous sets of data. Fragile enterprise networks are rapidly emerging as the weakest link in the enterprise, which has significant implications for everything from data consolidation to cloud computing applications.

 Unfortunately, when it comes to dealing with these issues, storage and networking administrators are not always working from the same playbook. But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that organizations are trying to force that issue by corporate fiat, which is finally giving storage and networking administrators a lot of incentive to find a solution to I/O latency issues across extended wide area networks (WANs) that everybody within IT can easily live with.