Riverbend Introduces Granite Technology; Centralizes Data Center Operations

Riverbend Technology has developed a centralized approach that leverages the advantages of data centers in organizations with a main office and several branch offices. Granite technology is designed to let enterprises consolidate their data without sacrificing performance. The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2002 and develops solutions for WAN, cloud, application performance and disaster recovery.

Because of many organizations' 'need for speed', centralized architectures that would have been simpler to manage, have not caught on. According to Riverbend, over half of enterprise data resides in branch offices.

While a decentralized approach has performance advantages, it can force the branches to become separate de facto IT departments, each performing tasks like maintenance or backups on its own. This could lead to each branch having its own set of IT policies as well, creating potential headaches for the main office. Another disadvantage of a decentralized architecture is that it’s not an efficient use of time. IT work that should be done at the main office is duplicated at each branch.

This would be far better than if each branch did little or no IT work. Under that scenario, maintenance and backups are done rarely, if at all, putting company data at risk.

Riverbend developed Granite technology with these issues in mind. Its performance capability allows organizations to take control of their data and move it to datacenters that have the infrastructure in place to keep information consistent and secure. Branch users can access information from the data center quickly, eliminating the need to set up servers in each branch.

The technology itself is delivered through rack-mountable WAN appliances; Granite Core at the main office and Granite Edge at the branch offices. Users will see no loss in performance between a Granite system and a decentralized one. Data integrity is easier to ensure and redundancy in IT work is eliminated.

Riverbend’s Granite solutions may be yet another example of technology that eventually leads to the death of the PC as it eliminates the slow performance that centralized architectures were maligned for in the past. Combining that with a marketplace that demands smartphones and tablets along with declining revenues for companies like Dell (News - Alert) and HP leads to the conclusion that the market for PCs will be a shadow of what it once was, if it even exists at all.