FD Insights Issue 13 | Page 40

IBM and Riverbed Technology Assess the untapped potential of your IT to help optimise application, storage and network performance. ith IT demand up but supply — both budget and headcount — down, reducing costs while increasing the business value of IT is critical. While server consolidation and virtualisation can help address these issues, many organisations cannot fully consolidate into a centralised data centre. Among other challenges, performance issues can be a significant obstacle. W IBM and Riverbed Technology can provide innovative consolidation and virtualisation techniques to help your systems and employees work better and faster. Consider the benefits of working with IBM and Riverbed Technology to help streamline and consolidate your branch infrastructure. We can provide an industry-leading solution that consolidates servers and data in your data centres for centralised management and protection — while delivering local-speed access for centralised data to remote users. Working with IBM and Riverbed Technology, you can build on your existing investments and adopt new technologies to gain more cost-effective, ready-to-run computing power and capacity, matched to your business needs. Depending on your needs, your engagement can provide: 1. A comprehensive assessment of your IT infrastructure, including existing storage hardware and Steelhead appliances, to address your consolidation demands for: * * * * Capacity Availability Data access Agility 2. A detailed analysis that documents the cost and performance benefits of bringing branch storage back into your data centre. 3. A Riverbed Steel Fusion implementation roadmap, which delivers a vendor-independent architectural solution that consolidates remote office servers and storage to the data centre (the core) while projecting applications and data to remote (edge) locations, where they operate as if they 38 | www.firstdistribution.co.za were local. This can provide users at edge locations with uncompromised performance. 4. IBM management of your Riverbed Steel Fusion environment, including backup, provision, patch and protect data on enterprise storage within the four walls of the data centre. Consolidate and simplify with the IBM Storwize family and Riverbed SteelFusion IBM and Riverbed Technology help organisations: * Streamline branch IT, simplify management, and reduce operational and administrative costs * More quickly provision servers to support enterprise-wide virtualisation initiatives * Simplify and accelerate branch office disaster recovery by more quickly re-provisioning and relocating services * Better protect and secure servers and data in the data centre using the same tools and methods applied to all corporate data * Eliminate the need to purchase, install and manage a backup solution at the branch-office level * Enhance local access and performance, boosting productivity Why IBM and Riverbed Technology? IBM and Riverbed Technology offer combined, market-leading IT optimisation solutions. Our alliance, which began in 2009, provides a combined solution that can deliver high-value, network-related services that draw on the knowledge and expertise of both companies: * Riverbed Technology provides cross-industry, leading IT performance, recognised in multiple categories by Gartner Magic Quadrant * IBM is a global leader in providing technology services, with deep experience in application performance and tuning of complex networks for application usage, and broad experience with enterprise applications