Riverbed Technology today announced Riverbed SteelFusion 5.0, which includes new support of Network Attached Storage (NAS), enhancing the flexibility and ease of managing remote and branch office IT. Riverbed SteelFusion is the only solution which provides the ability to "project" storage assets from data centers or the cloud out to remote business locations, eliminating the cost and security risk associated with managing islands of remote storage and backup infrastructure. Riverbed also announced it has surpassed 1,000 customers for SteelFusion, helping organizations around the world transform their approach to managing remote and branch office IT infrastructure with a software-defined approach that delivers the security, agility and cost-effectiveness required by today's modern enterprise.

"Riverbed is proud to deliver a software-defined edge solution with SteelFusion 5.0, which provides a cloud-grade experience for managing edge IT infrastructure," said Paul O'Farrell, Senior Vice President and General Manager of SteelHead, SteelFusion and SteelConnect at Riverbed. "With SteelFusion, organizations benefit from an extensible and software-defined services solution that delivers unprecedented flexibility, control, and automation for managing remote office IT. By adding support for data center NAS to its support for SAN and Object-based storage, our customers now have complete flexibility to extend the power, security and protection of data center and cloud-based storage out to every location where they do business."

In today's cloud-centric and digital world, IT organizations face new challenges in remote and branch office locations. IT is being tasked to increase business agility, reduce operational costs, and assure information security and application performance all while navigating unprecedented complexity rising from cloud adoption and hybrid IT. SteelFusion streamlines and transforms how IT manages remote IT infrastructure by centralizing 100% of remote data along with corresponding backup and recovery procedures. With its unique ability to project storage and virtual services from centrally managed data centers or from the cloud out to remote locations, SteelFusion gives IT a scalable approach to deploying and managing remote applications and services across any number of business locations.

Now with SteelFusion 5.0, organizations and service providers can enable this software-defined edge solution in multiple ways based on their desired approach, extending the value of traditional on-premises data center storage (SAN, NAS), private cloud (Software-defined Storage) or public cloud (Object) scenarios. NAS storage systems continue to be a significant and attractive storage backend for VMware environments. As a significant number of enterprise IT organizations continue to leverage a mix of storage options (Block, File, and Object), SteelFusion 5.0 offers flexibility by supporting all storage protocols in the data center or cloud and extending them all the way to the edge with a consistent, centralized operating model. To learn more about all key benefits of SteelFusion 5.0, visit https://www.riverbed.com/products/steelfusion.html.

SteelFusion Surpasses 1,000 Customers Globally

SteelFusion has continued to gain momentum in the market over the past several years. Now, with over 1,000 customers, organizations around the globe are benefitting from implementing a software-defined approach to managing remote and branch office IT. By purchasing SteelFusion, the State of Kentucky avoided spending an additional $900,000 and allowed its staff to focus on more strategic projects, instead of spending time dealing with backups. The State of Kentucky also eliminated the potential loss of valuable government project data with centralized backups.

"We modernized our infrastructure. Back-ups are now complete. If we want to spin-up a new server there is no buying a new server and waiting for it to come in. The time to deployment has been reduced significantly because we can leverage our existing VMs," said Travis Wagers, Information Systems Manager, Kentucky Transportation Cabinet's Office of Information Technology. "So, we have future-proofed our infrastructure."

In addition to the State of Kentucky, leading global organizations across all industries are seeing significant benefits using Riverbed SteelFusion:

• Riverbed SteelFusion Allows European Insurance Provider CBP to Take Control of Branch IT with a Software-defined Edge - European insurance provider CBP uses SteelFusion to improve application performance, enhance data security, and virtualize servers at its subsidiaries across Europe
• Riverbed Helps Energy Company Engen Centralize Remote and Branch Office IT and Accelerate Application Performance - Global energy company Engen leverages SteelFusion to centralize Remote and Branch Office (ROBO) IT, and improve productivity, backup and data security across its multi-national organization
• Riverbed Helps Swedish Manufacturer Roxtec Provision and Manage Branch Offices Faster to Keep Pace with Growth - Swedish manufacturer Roxtec has deployed SteelFusion to enable IT efficiencies, which supports its rapid growth of around 15-20% annually
• Drakes Supermarkets Reduces Downtime and Simplifies Backup and Recovery for More than 50 Retail Stores with Riverbed SteelFusion - Riverbed SteelFusion has enabled Drakes Supermarket to dramatically reduce downtime and deliver instant recovery for its retail branches. For Drakes, the ability to instantly recover a remote site can deliver savings of up to AUD$100K per outage

"We are seeing that IT organizations are rapidly evolving to a hybrid cloud architecture, and there is real business opportunity in improving operations far beyond the centralized data center core and out at the remote edge - which often includes hundreds or even thousands of locations in an enterprise. As businesses strive for digital transformation, this introduces new challenges that can impede IT's ability to ensure agility, security and application performance for these locations," said Terri McClure, senior analyst, ESG. "Riverbed addresses these edge IT challenges with a software-defined edge solution, powered by SteelFusion, to help businesses simplify, standardize and converge their remote IT infrastructure and operations - accelerating time to value and overall security, and giving IT the agility to stay in tune with today's constantly evolving digital enterprise."

SteelFusion is expected to be available towards the end of March.

For more information on SteelFusion, visit http://www.riverbed.com/products/steelfusion.html.