Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the leader in application performance infrastructure, announced that WAMGROUP has deployed Riverbed® SteelFusion™ branch converged infrastructure to strengthen its branch office disaster-recovery capabilities and provide resilient IT support to its corporate office in the heart of an earthquake zone. With SteelFusion, WAMGROUP has consolidated servers and storage into a managed data center, lowering costs while maintaining local application performance for branch workers. Now, with SteelFusion’s virtualization and centralization capabilities, WAMGROUP can protect and back up its data in a secure environment, instantly recover its business in the event of a natural disaster, and reduce its branch IT footprint.
WAMGROUP manufactures and supplies equipment for bulk material handling, dust filtration, wastewater, mixing and vibration technology. Founded in 1969, the Italian company’s dedication to R&D and engineering design makes it one of Italy’s most prominent ambassadors of manufacturing. WAMGROUP has commercial and manufacturing presence in 43 countries around the world and employs 2,400 employees globally.
As a long-standing Riverbed customer, WAMGROUP also uses Riverbed® SteelHead™ to optimize its wide area networks and speed the delivery of critical computer-aided design (CAD) files between its corporate offices and production and assembly sites located throughout the world in places as far flung as India, Croatia, USA, and China.
In May 2012, two earthquakes hit Northern Italy, causing widespread damage. Situated close to the epicenter, WAMGROUP’s head office was severely damaged. To future-proof its business, WAMGROUP decided to create “server-less offices” by virtualizing and managing its branch servers and storage in an anti-seismic, redundant and high-availability data center outside the “at-risk” zone. With SteelFusion, WAMGROUP centrally manages virtual machines, applications and data in a data center and projects them to converged appliances in remote offices for use by distributed users. SteelFusion accelerates provisioning of branches from the data center so that new branch offices can be opened faster and more cost-efficiently, and accelerates recovery in the event of a site failure. SteelFusion also allows WAMGROUP to get the most out of its data center storage area network (SAN) investments, eliminating underused storage contained within the physical branch office servers.
“With Riverbed SteelFusion, we’re now much more resilient as a business. We can provision, manage, back up, and recover any of our sites from our central data center. While business continuity was our business driver, it’s also good to know that our new model has a much lower cost of ownership than before,” said Marco Malavolta, Head of IT Infrastructure, WAMGROUP. “Thanks to SteelFusion, we no longer need to store and manage our data and important systems in high-risk areas. We are now able to instantly recover the business. At the same time the virtualisation aspect is making better use of my storage capacity and centralized resources to the extent that we’ve seen a return on investment after six months.”
Riverbed SteelFusion and the Application Performance Management Platform
Riverbed SteelFusion is a branch converged infrastructure solution that centralizes data in the data center and delivers local performance with instant recovery at the branch. SteelFusion consolidates branch servers, storage, networking, and virtualization infrastructure into a single solution. SteelFusion expedites branch office provisioning, backup, and recovery and ensures continuous operations when disasters occur from any cause – weather, fire, or accident. With SteelFusion, businesses can restore branch operations in a matter of minutes vs. days, centrally protect and secure data in the data center, and significantly lower the TCO of branch and remote offices.
Riverbed SteelFusion is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform™, the most complete platform to enable organizations to embrace location-independent computing, so that business objectives – not technical constraints – drive how applications and data are delivered.
__________________________________________