At an event entitled Data Where You Need It; Control Where You Want It, Riverbed Technology will unveil breakthroughs in software-defined data centre deployments with Granite technology that extend the benefits of the data centre to global branch offices. 
At the event, Riverbed will highlight customer successes and showcase demonstrations of its disruptive new approach to consolidating edge data to the secure data centre, while delivering local performance access to branch employees. Riverbed will be joined at the event by alliance partner EMC, an IDC analyst, and Granite customers.
Despite efforts to consolidate and move to software-defined architectures, the business need to provide fast access to data and applications has forced organisations to keep servers and storage at the branch. According to leading industry analysts, more than 50 percent of all enterprise data resides in branch locations.
Riverbed and its customers and partners will demonstrate technology and strategies that extend the benefits of the data centre to branch offices. Together, these advances enable 100% consolidation of resources to the secure data centre and create new possibilities for IT, including instant provisioning of branch offices from the data centre and instant restore should disaster occur.
The following analysts, partners, and customers will join Riverbed at the event:
* Rick Villars, VP, Data Centre and Cloud at IDC, will provide industry perspective on the state of the data centre and rapidly evolving solutions for data centre transformation and converged IT infrastructure.
* Scott Ryan, senior director at Riverbed alliance partner EMC, will discuss how EMC customers working with Riverbed enable organisations to achieve rapid and local access to centralised data that is protected and secured on highly scalable and reliable data centre-class storage systems.
* Jerry Vigil, director of IT operations, Bill Barrett Corporation; and Searl Tate, director of engineering at Riverbed customer Paul Hastings, will discuss how they are deploying Granite to consolidate branch office infrastructure securely while benefiting from data centre-based management, instant provisioning, and instant restore.
“Until now, the benefits of a software-defined architecture were limited to the data centre. Customer use cases highlight how these benefits can extend globally throughout the worldwide enterprise,” says John Martin, senior VP and GM, Storage Delivery at Riverbed.
Riverbed introduced award-winning Granite storage delivery solutions to enable more organisations to completely consolidate their branch office IT. Granite gives organisations a groundbreaking storage delivery solution with the unique capability to “vacuum up” servers and storage from branch and remote offices so they can be centrally controlled in the data centre.
By leveraging the Granite solution, organisations have the ability to not only completely consolidate servers and storage, but also get rid of remote backup and improve data security by putting data in secure locations to remove risk. In 2013, Riverbed created a new storage delivery business unit led by John Martin.