One of the challenges large companies are facing is how to build and support IT infrastructure (network, server, and storage) for remote offices. Remote offices usually do not have full time IT employees because it is usually cost prohibitive to employ full time IT personnel to support a small IT infrastructure. In addition, large companies are very protective of their data and want their data to be centralized at their data centers sitting on a reliable and well protected infrastructure.

However, centralizing the infrastructure and data location may lead to poor performance for the local site, especially if the WAN bandwidth and latency is not that great.

Enter Riverbed Steelfusion. Riverbed SteelFusion is a branch converged infrastructure solution that centralizes data in the datacenter and delivers local performance and nearly instant recovery at the branch. It does this by consolidating branch servers, storage, networking and virtualization infrastructure into a single solution.

With Steelfusion, a virtual machine which will act as a branch file or application server is provisioned at the data center where a Steelfusion Core is located, and is projected to the branch via the Steelfusion Edge located at the branch office.

Steelfusion has the following advantages:

1. No more costly installation and maintenance of servers and storage at the branch office.
2. LAN performance in the branch, which will make end users happy.
3. Centralized management of storage, servers, and data at the data center.
4. No more costly branch backup (such as backup hardware and software, tape media, backup management, off-site handling, etc)
5. Improved recovery of servers and applications.
6. Quick provisioning of servers.
7. Data is secure in the data center, in case branch office has a disaster or theft.

Delivering data and applications located at the data centers to branch/remote offices while maintaining local area performance can be accomplished by using Riverbed Steelfusion.