Consolidation

Consolidation remains a top IT priority in businesses across verticals as organizations seek greater cost efficiency, improved data protection, and flexible resource provisioning. By enabling data center consolidation, infrastructure centralization, and branch services consolidation, Riverbed has helped thousands of customers achieve business agility and positive ROI.

Application-aware network performance monitoring (NPM), WAN optimization, edge virtual server infrastructure (Edge-VSI), and application delivery controllers (ADCs) allow organizations to centralize infrastructure resources and better manage the delivery of applications.

• With Cascade, customers can leverage Layer 7 visibility to quickly map application dependencies and monitor the ongoing delivery of applications
• With Stingray, customers can drive greater efficiency, scale and automation from within consolidated data centers by intelligently distributing user traffic and offloading compute intensive tasks
• With Steelhead^®, customers can reduce bandwidth utilization by 50-90 percent and improve  application response time across the WAN by as much as 100x.
• With Granite^®, customers can fully virtualize edge servers and storage, consolidate to the data center, and project data and applications to edge locations as if they were local

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

Consolidating data centers and maximizing data center efficiency reduces costs and improves manageability. Riverbed helps customers plan and accelerate data center migrations, eliminate regional data centers while continuing to deliver application performance to remote users, and improve the performance and scalability of applications running in virtualized, consolidated data centers. Organizations at all stages of data center consolidation can benefit from Cascade application dependency mapping, Steelhead WAN optimization, Stingray load balancing, and Granite virtual server infrastructure.

For more information about Data Center Consolidation:

• Four Missing Components to Data Center Moves
• Chalk Talk: Private Cloud Consolidation

Using Riverbed, IT can fully virtualize edge servers and storage, consolidate to the data center, and project data and applications to edge locations as if they were local.  All data can be managed centrally to take advantage of data center tools and cost efficiencies.  Granite is edge virtual server infrastructure (Edge-VSI).  Granite radically reduces operational burden on IT managers while massively increasing their control over the infrastructure—all at a lower total cost of ownership. Granite is the innovation that enables an architectural disruption known as edge virtual server infrastructure (Edge-VSI).  Edge-VSI enables the best of all worlds:  100% consolidated data and applications that deliver LAN performance at the edge over the WAN. 

For more information about Infrastructure Consolidation:

• Avoiding the Hazards of IT Consolidation
• Desktop Virtualization and WAN Optimization
• Chalk Talk: Desktop Virtualization 

Even though a company consolidates IT infrastructure to simplify management, lower costs, and improve data protection and resource utilization, some services still need to be delivered locally. Local print, DNS, and DHCP are edge services that defy central consolidation efforts. VSP runs these services on the Steelhead appliance, so organizations can eliminate redundant servers to further reduce hardware, software, and maintenance costs and IT complexity. The result is serverless branches running virtually on Steelhead appliances.

For more information about Branch Services Consolidation:

• Branch Consolidation Solution brief