WHITE PAPER Riverbed Granite Use Cases Riverbed Technical Marketing
Purpose The following whitepaper outlines the use cases addressed by Riverbed Granite. Audience This whitepaper is intended for Riverbed customers, partners, IT architects and planners, and professional services engineers who are interested in learning which real world problems Granite solves. Previous experience with storage networking concepts is highly recommended, as is a strong background in storage planning and deployment. Introduction The Remote / Branch Office Environment Today s IT infrastructure is increasingly distributed and difficult to manage. Many critical business applications and services reside outside the data center in places such as retail stores, bank branches, law firms satellite offices, manufacturing plants, construction sites, medical clinics and warehouses. Typically these remote or branch office locations are connected to a corporate data center or main office via a wide area network (WAN). Many organizations have initiated consolidation projects to centralize distributed IT infrastructure. By bringing application servers and storage resources back into the data center, IT departments have been able to simplify management, lower costs, improve data protection, and gain more efficient resource utilization. Riverbed helps customers successfully consolidate by enabling LANlike application performance over the WAN with Riverbed Steelhead appliances. With a combination of application streamlining, data streamlining, and transport streamlining, Steelhead WAN optimization appliances eliminate 60-95 percent of WAN traffic and accelerate application performance across the WAN by up to 100 times. Figure 1: Riverbed Steelhead appliances deliver LAN-like access to applications and data across the WAN In addition to consolidating application servers and storage into the data center, many organizations consolidate within the branch office as well. For IT resources that must remain in the branch services like print, DNS, DHCP, anti-virus and Active Directory Riverbed helps customers achieve branch consolidation goals with Steelhead EX appliances featuring the Virtual Services Platform (VSP). VSP enables multiple standalone servers to be virtualized on a single branch office box. By eliminating complex build outs or the need to buy, install, and manage remote servers, branches are set up faster and leaner, administrative overhead decreases, and users are more productive. Figure 2: Steelhead EX with the Virtual Services Platform (VSP) enables consolidation of branch applications 1
Despite the success of consolidation initiatives enabled by Steelhead appliances and VSP, a significant amount of IT infrastructure remains in branch offices. Typically this is due to the requirements of custom- and write-intensive applications that: Require block-based storage access Need local storage performance Have a low tolerance for WAN challenges such as limited bandwidth, high latency, and connectivity issues To serve the needs of these branch-based applications, organizations often have no choice but to deploy local storage solutions such as direct attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS), and in some cases a storage area network (SAN). The result of application storage remaining in the branch is that a significant amount of the corporate data resides outside of the data center and frequently is not managed following the same protection, security, and compliance best practices as the data center. To protect and secure data, IT administrators are forced to deploy costly, sometimes cumbersome and slow, backup and recovery solutions in branch offices. This generates a significant amount of orphaned infrastructure in the branch office i.e., infrastructure that is needed but hard to manage. This significantly increases business costs and risks. Figure 3: Local branch storage Granite Overview Riverbed Granite is edge virtual server infrastructure (Edge-VSI). Granite radically reduces operational burden on IT managers while massively increasing their control over the infrastructure all at a lower total cost of ownership. Granite is the innovation that enables an architectural disruption known as Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure (Edge-VSI). Edge-VSI enables the best of all worlds: 100% consolidated data and applications that deliver LAN performance at the edge over the WAN. In the past, data centers and edge offices were managed through separate operational processes, procedures and infrastructures. Granite bridges the gap between the data center and global offices at the edge, allowing for seamless integration between data center and globally distributed operations. Granite introduces a new architectural approach that does for edge servers outside of the data center what virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) did for desktops: allow IT to consolidate and manage all edge servers in the data center. Granite does what was previously thought impossible: it allows storage to be decoupled from its server over thousands of miles of distance and actually work as if the storage were local to the server. End users in edge locations get uncompromised performance, while IT management is able to manage, backup, provision, patch, expand, and protect the data all within the four walls of the data center. Organizations traditionally run applications and corresponding storage in edge environments close to end users for performance reasons. Reads and writes over the WAN to centrally stored data were not technically possible. Riverbed Granite allows data to reside centrally be available to edge servers as if it were local. Riverbed Granite solves the problem of distance (bandwidth and latency) low in the tech stack: at the block level. By adding file system intelligence to the block layer, it, among other things, parallelizes interactions between server and storage that was otherwise sequential. This innovation means that data and servers that used to be distributed can now reside centrally and users at the edge will not notice. This innovation effectively projects the applications and data to the edge locations where they perform as if they were local. 2
Just as Riverbed Steelhead appliances powered the first level of server and storage consolidation, Granite enables the next level of storage consolidation. With Granite, organizations can deliver a global storage infrastructure by extending an iscsi SAN in the data center to branch offices, eliminating the need to purchase and support storage devices at the edge. Granite consists of two components: Granite Core a physical or virtual appliance that resides in the data center alongside centralized storage Granite Edge a service that runs as a standalone target at the edge or bundled with a Riverbed Steelhead appliance Granite Core mounts LUNs provisioned in the data center and shares the storage resources with branch offices running the Granite Edge module. Granite Edge virtually presents one or more iscsi targets in the branch which can be utilized as a storage drive by services and systems running within the VSP as well as externally to the Steelhead EX appliance. Granite Core inspects mounted LUNs and is able to proactively stream data to the branch locations. This industry-first, file-system-aware block acceleration capability allows data from centralized storage to be available wherever and whenever it is needed. Through asynchronous block-based write acceleration Granite Edge ensures that data created in branch office locations is securely stored in the data center. With Granite, since branch data actually resides in the data center there is no need to deploy expensive distributed replication or data backup solutions at the branch office. Data can be protected in the data center leveraging the same tools and methodologies applied to all corporate data. Figure 4: Granite accelerates block-storage over the WAN 3
Granite Use Cases The ability of Granite to extend centralized storage to remote branches without performance penalty makes the solution a perfect fit for organizations that run branch office applications that require local storage. There are three primary Granite use cases that align with customer branch office initiatives: Storage consolidation Branch recovery Branch office data security Storage Consolidation Even though most businesses have undertaken IT consolidation initiatives, local servers and storage devices are still resident in branch offices to meet performance and productivity requirements. Typical applications that run in the branch office and require local storage are: File servers Custom applications Write-intensive applications Encrypted and compressed workloads Database servers (i.e., Microsoft SQL Server) Image acquisition Document scanning CAD applications These applications, commonly used by a variety of organizations including advertising agencies, law firms, financial corporations, and law enforcement agencies, typically generate random I/O and are very sensitive to I/O latency. To meet branch applications requirements, IT departments quickly deploy local storage or a local file server as a quick fix. Over time these islands of storage become remote support and management problems for IT administrators at the central data center, ranging from remote provisioning issues to difficult and expensive replication and data protection concerns. Administrators also have to worry about more serious problems such as unauthorized access, data leakage, and the installation of unwanted software. With Granite, branch office storage can be consolidated and centralized into the data center. Companies no longer need to deploy local storage at the branch office. Instead, IT administrators can now provision a LUN at the data center and present it via Granite at the branch office as though it were local without impacting the end user experience. Granite in conjunction with Steelhead appliances, accelerates access to the storage consolidated at the data center, ensuring that applications perform just as well as with local storage. Figure 5: Granite enables consolidation of storage in the data center with optimized access over the WAN 4
Branch Recovery One of the major concerns and costs for organizations is the ability to restore service in a branch office in the event of any equipment loss or disaster. By delivering consolidation and centralization of data as well as the ability to project storage from the data center to the branch, Granite helps organizations be more effective with branch recovery. In the data center, branch data can be more frequently protected using technologies such as array-based snapshots as well as traditional backup and recovery. Because there are more options from which to recover, Granite enables organizations to improve recovery point objectives (RPOs). Because Granite accelerates access to centralized data across the WAN, Granite also improves recovery time objectives (RTOs). It is no longer necessary to perform full data recoveries to restore service to branch offices. In the case of branch office disaster, since data is available at the datacenter it can be streamed to the local branch as needed. Application servers, once restored in the branch, are simply re-attached to the remote storage LUNs via a newly deployed Steelhead EX+Granite appliance. Granite will stream on the fly any needed data back to the remote office allowing application servers to resume operations in minutes. Figure 6: Granite streamlines branch recovery Branch Office Data Security Many organizations are concerned with the security of data created and residing in the branch. As businesses grow and expand into new regions around the globe this concern becomes even more acute. When storage is managed and maintained directly in the branch, not only is data vulnerable to unauthorized access but storage devices themselves are also susceptible to theft. With Granite, organizations can better protect critical corporate data assets. When storage is consolidated from the branch to the data center where physical access is commonly protected with stringent security, branch data is more secure. Additionally, the Granite solution delivers security against unauthorized access as well. While the data is streamed from the data center to the branch office, Steelhead EX appliances use Secure Peering technology to encrypt data in flight. To protect data projected to the branch office, Granite Edge features AES 256-bit encryption of the local Granite blockstore cache. Granite features a secure vault that protects information from your Granite configuration using AES 256-bit encryption, including SSL private keys and the blockstore encryption key. Any organizations that have concerns about the security of data in branch offices can leverage Granite to gain better control and safeguard valuable corporate data assets. 5
Figure 7: Granite delivers secure access to data across the WAN Conclusion Riverbed continues to help organizations gain better control over their IT infrastructure and consolidate more to lower costs and risks without impacting the performance required to ensure user productivity in branch offices. With Granite, Riverbed enables a global storage infrastructure by intelligently accelerating storage protocols across the WAN, enabling new efficiency with data management, protection, and recovery while ensuring performance a the edge. With Granite, organizations can: Reduce costs by eliminating storage from branch offices Improve management efficiency as maintenance and backup can take place at the data center Recover faster and more effectively since the data is stored centrally, protected more frequently, and can be streamed to the branch office as needed Improve security of data assets via centralization and state-of-the-art encryption capabilities About Riverbed Riverbed delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com. Riverbed Technology, Inc. 199 Fremont Street San Francisco, CA 94105 Tel: (415) 247-8800 www.riverbed.com Riverbed Technology Ltd. One Thames Valley Wokingham Road, Level 2 Bracknell. RG42 1NG United Kingdom Tel: +44 1344 401900 Riverbed Technology Pte. Ltd. 391A Orchard Road #22-06/10 Ngee Ann City Tower A Singapore 238873 Tel: +65 6508-7400 Riverbed Technology K.K. Shiba-Koen Plaza, Bldg. 9F 3-6-9, Shiba, Minato-ku Tokyo, Japan 105-0014 Tel: +81 3 5419 1990 2012 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners. The trademarks and logos displayed herein may not be used without the prior written consent of Riverbed Technology or their respective owners. 6