Riverbed Technology 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 centralises 100% of data and physical servers from remote sites into data centres 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 centralised data centres out to every remote location where business is conducted – including regional offices, local stores, banks, manufacturing plants, hospitals, government centres, 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 datacentre.  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 vCentre 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 centralised data centre 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 long-time 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 Organisation, VMware. "With SteelFusion and VMware vSphere 6, the leading virtualisation platform, branch offices are empowered to increase agility without compromising user productivity."                                                                

Availability

SteelFusion 4.2 will be available in November.