Riverbed Introduces Whitewater Cloud Storage Gateway Appliance

Riverbed Technology, the performance company, has introduced a new Whitewater cloud storage gateway model appliance to handle larger backup data workloads and an operating system for all Whitewater appliance models. The new Whitewater model 3010 appliance offers four times the local storage capacity of previous models to address larger scale enterprise requirements. Additionally, Riverbed is introducing Whitewater Operating System (WWOS) version 2.0, which was built for enterprise-grade performance, high scalability and simplified administration. Whitewater appliances running WWOS 2.0 will enable enterprises to better leverage cloud storage to meet their critical backup requirements, modernise their data management strategies and overcome the challenges created by the staggering pace of data growth.

While companies have relied on tape-based backups for decades, the growth of data is putting enterprises at risk because the process of recovering data from tapes often exceeds service level agreements (SLAs) demanded by the business. Some enterprises have responded by moving to replicated disk-based backup strategies, but relentless data growth has made these configurations cost-prohibitive for many IT departments. As a result, data protection is becoming an increasingly difficult and expensive task for enterprises. At the same time, cloud storage prices are continuing to drop to new lows making it a new, more cost-effective and attractive alternative to enterprises. Cloud storage gateways like Whitewater enable organisations to instantly leverage the scale and flexibility of the cloud as they seek to securely manage and protect vital business and customer information.

Whitewater appliances modernise data protection and streamline IT operations for organisations of all sizes. Whitewater appliances eliminate tape, improve disaster recovery (DR) readiness, and seamlessly integrate with existing data protection software applications to reduce costs 30 to 50 percent over tape and replicated disk solutions. The result is a fast return on investment that leverages the cloud for backup storage and as a DR site. This lights out, no tape backup model frees administrators from mundane backup tasks and allows them to focus on higher value IT projects. Organisations typically deploy Whitewater appliances and begin moving data to the cloud in less than an hour and can connect popular data protection applications to leading cloud service providers without changes to existing infrastructure, schedules or policies.

To better meet the needs of enterprises, Riverbed is introducing the Whitewater 3010 model appliance for larger backup data sets. With four times the disk storage and twice the RAM of the previous largest Whitewater model, enterprises can quickly improve their data protection, implement a low cost backup storage tier and enjoy the benefits of pay-for-use cloud storage.

In the new WWOS 2.0, Riverbed is introducing several new features that enable enterprises to have more efficient, reliable backup and restores, as well as centralised administration and remote support.

Enterprises can confidently move to the cloud as larger full backups are supported. When used with the Whitewater 3010 model appliance, enterprises can now support up to 32 TB of deduplicated local storage and 160 TB of deduplicated cloud storage. This capacity increase represents total source data of 1.6 PB to 4.8 PB.

To ensure that backups can be accomplished during tight backup windows, WWOS 2.0 offers increased data ingest performance for faster processing of larger backups. With the Whitewater 3010 model appliance, enterprises can see up to a 50 percent improvement over previous models. To ensure the protection of critical business data, a new enterprise management dashboard provides users with real time monitoring and advanced reporting to better analyse, monitor and manage cloud backup processes. Enterprises can remotely control and centrally manage Whitewater appliances using lights-out management technology to reboot, shutdown or monitor one or more appliances. To eliminate issues before they impact operations, enterprises can set up alerts to notify administrators when critical thresholds are projected to be reached. Enterprises can streamline operations and improve security by centrally managing user access to Whitewater appliances leveraging existing Windows Active Directory policies and deployments.

“By working closely with customers that have deployed our Whitewater cloud storage gateway appliances and incorporating feedback from our growing base of enterprise users, we are introducing several new features,” said Riverbed Whitewater Cloud Storage General Manager Ray Villeneuve. “Enterprises now have the capacity, enhanced performance, management features, and security they need to cost-efficiently and seamlessly send and store backup and infrequently used archival data off-site to public and private storage clouds. Now a broader range of organisations have a fast, secure and reliable method to meet their recovery time and recovery point objectives and enhance their data management strategies.”