As applications have been centralised to the datacentre or cloud, there are always exceptions where applications and data have to be maintained locally in the branch, this is where SteelFusion steps in.
By attaching to storage arrays in the datacentre or integrating with Azure and AWS cloud storage, SteelFusion can centrally manage and “project” allocated storage out to the branch. Once the data is available in the branch the user experience is as it would be had a local storage array been deployed, even if the WAN links were unavailable. Any changes to the data are sent back to the central storage arrays meaning that in the event of a disaster all the data is protected.
Two key considerations when planning for business continuity are recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO). RPO is a measure of how much data could be lost between backups should a system fail, with scheduled daily backups this could be 24 hours or more. SteelFusion reduces this time to minutes. RTO is a measure of how long it takes to restore a system to an operational state following a disaster, with traditional servers and backups this could be days or weeks. Arguably, SteelFusion can reduce this to less than 10 minutes.
In addition to the storage benefits from SteelFusion, the hyper-converged platform also includes a virtual machine host with dedicated hardware resource ready to run the applications delivered from the central storage. A fully functional SteelHead completes the capability of this amazing appliance. So not only do you benefit from delivering local applications with local performance you also accelerate those centralised applications too.
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