Companies have turned to virtual infrastructure as a method to save costs through IT consolidation and platform independence as well as augmenting their disaster recovery strategy. Server virtualization allows IT to maximize resource utilization while containing server sprawl to minimize the physical footprint of hardware in data centers.
With the joint solution, we have been able to eliminate 66% of our servers and accelerate our VMware disaster recovery traffic increasing our WAN capacity on an average by 2.5x.
To make it even better, we still get the daily benefits of improved WAN performance at our branch offices for our attorney’s and other professionals."
Riverbed Steelhead products take the threshold of flexibility for virtual machines to the next level. As the most comprehensive WDS solution on the market, Steelhead products work to enable end-to-end virtualization for companies. The Riverbed WDS solution does this by addressing the following areas:
- performance needs at the branch office
- and availability at the data center
- mobility and performance for mobile workers
Consolidation with no
performance hit
Imagine using virtualization to consolidate 50 physical servers in branches down to 5 in a data center with no performance hit for your end-users. With Riverbed, this is a reality that customers already experience today. Riverbed Steelhead products can accelerate application access and data transfer times by up to 100x. Multiple customers have consolidated servers and sites using Riverbed and VMware together without their end-users ever knowing applications and data have been moved hundreds of miles away.
Steelhead products make the constraints of bandwidth and geography disappear, and enable companies to easily reduce their hardware and software costs through consolidation.
Click here for more details on how organizations are using VMware and Riverbed together to achieve global consolidation of resources.
Disaster Recovery & Virtualization
Organizations are also leveraging virtualization technologies like VMware to improve their DR capabilities while also lowering costs. Many companies can now replicate virtual machine images to a remote DR site for faster recovery of server failures. In the event of a failure, the servers no longer need to be rebuilt, and the virtual servers give organizations hardware independence, so exact replicas of hardware do not need to be maintained at the DR site. With Riverbed’s acceleration, companies also won’t suffer performance degradation when they need to failover to a remote location, ensuring that users can access applications and information when they’ll be needed the most.
Click here to get more details on Riverbed, VMware, and Disaster Recovery
Saving on DR Costs - Industry estimates indicate that companies spend approximately one-third of their DR budget on bandwidth. IT shops can save even more on their DR budget with Riverbed, because Steelhead products reduce bandwidth utilization to allow the replication of data and virtual machine images over lower bandwidth links.
Many businesses are also utilizing both Riverbed and VMware to leverage a Dual-Use DR configuration. With Dual-Use DR, a normally idle DR site is instead used 24 x 7 for Tier 2 applications and servers. In the event of a failure at the primary site, the Tier 1 virtual servers are migrated to the DR site to ensure that mission critical operations are still available. The end result provides organizations with full utilization of their hardware and data center locations, while still providing cost-effective recovery capabilities. By minimizing the time required to migrate VM images, Riverbed can help companies recover faster and lower the cost of downtime during an outage.
We now see upwards of 50 to 55x improvement in data transfer for a snap of a VMware machine."
Desktop Virtualization
Leading organizations today are adopting desktop virtualization to standardize the deployment of desktop images while also providing a secured environment for applications and data. Many companies are taking advantage of Steelhead products along with desktop virtualization technology, such as VMware ACE.
Together, businesses can easily deploy virtual desktop images in minutes to remote users, 3rd party business partners, and mobile workers to centrally support desktops, ensure standardization, and protect critical business information. Steelhead Mobile, as the leading mobile acceleration software in the market, works easily with VMware ACE to speed deployment to users wherever they connect to the network.
