The product is a converged infrastructure solution, encompassing all branch services such as server, storage, networking, and WAN optimization. It is a dual-ended system that comprises two logical components: Core and Edge.

Core is located in the data center and mounts all LUNs that need to be made available to applications and servers at the branch from the centralized storage array. Core appliances communicate across the WAN with the Edge appliances located at the branch.

Edge is an appliance that is located at the branch, either provided by Riverbed or run on approved, commercial off-the-shelf hardware using Edge. The Edge provides a virtualized environment that hosts the branch application servers. The Edge also provides WAN optimization (depending on your order) and BlockStream-enabled storage.

The product delivers local user performance to applications and data, while enabling the centralization of these applications and data, instant recovery, and lower total operating costs. You can access applications that run locally in your branch while the data is maintained and protected in your data center. Decoupling computation from its underlying storage allows your applications to run in a stateless mode, which reduces your branch footprint and centralizes management of your branch services.

Edge is a software-defined edge solution that extends the product to third-party commodity hardware. Edge acts as a virtual storage appliance to the underlying ESXi hypervisor, running on the host hardware by presenting storage through iSCSI. It also allows external hosts to access storage using the iSCSI protocol. A typical Edge deployment consists of a single ESXi host with a single Edge virtual machine (VM). In the case of high availability (HA), two separate Edge VMs would be deployed on two separate vSphere hosts. You can make Edge highly available in an active-passive configuration, using iSCSI MPIO for path failover.

Edge uses a hybrid storage architecture with a combination of SSD-based cache and spinning HDD media. The boot disk of the Edge resides on a local VMFS datastore and requires a minimum of two RAID volumes. Edge consumes this storage and exports it to the ESXi host as a VMware datastore.

The Edge software can be installed on any hardware that complies with the Riverbed-provided reference hardware specification. We do not publish a hardware compatibility list; partners can choose hardware that complies with specifications.

To streamline the installation process and achieve repeatable consistent deployments, the Edge Installation Server is required to deploy the Edge VM. To download the Edge Installation Server, see the Riverbed Support site. The Edge Installation Server will deploy both ESXi and the Edge VM. The Installation Server contains an embedded ESXi installer; however, we recommend using the ESXi image provided by the server vendor to ensure that the appropriate drivers and utilities are installed. The Edge Installation Server has been packaged with ESXi versions 7.0 U3p and 8.0 U2b. By default ESXi-7.0 U3p is deployed along with Edge VM. You can switch between the packaged versions.

After you license and obtain a serial number for Edge appliances, you can manage them across the enterprise from a Core and vSphere vCenter.