SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Riverbed Technology announced a new architectural approach called edge virtual server infrastructure (edge-VSI) that does for edge servers what virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) did for desktops. It allows IT to consolidate and manage all edge servers in a data centre.

However, unlike VDI, edge-VSI does this while delivering 20-50 per cent lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

Riverbed Granite is a new product that enables edge-VSI. With Granite, enterprises can consolidate edge applications, servers and storage to the data centre, while delivering services to the edge of the enterprise as if they were local, says a release.

Edge-VSI is complementary to wide area network (WAN) optimization, add the release.

"We have offices across Asia, Europe and the United States and are pursuing a completely consolidated infrastructure to reduce our management requirements and lower our operating costs. Though we had centralized most of our IT infrastructure, we still had servers and storage in our remote locations," said Searl Tate, director of engineering, Paul Hastings.
Granite solves bandwidth and latency problems over distributed networks, however, lower in the technology stack -- at the block level -- making it possible to deliver global storage and server infrastructure extended from the data centre over the WAN.

"Granite allows us to consolidate these remaining servers and storage and at the same time deliver the local application performance our remote employees demand. This complete consolidation model will reduce our total cost of ownership by a third, while reducing our risk profile and giving us the control we need."

Adding file system intelligence to the block layer, it, among other things, parallelizes interactions between server and storage that were otherwise sequential. This means that distributed data and servers can now reside in one place and the performance for users at the edge will not be impacted, all while eliminating up to 50 per cent of the costs associated with managing distributed infrastructure, says the company in the release.

Granite requires two components: Granite Core, a physical or virtual appliance in the data center, and Granite Edge, a service running on a Steelhead EX in the branch office.