Riverbed Unveils Whitewater Operating System 2.1 With Amazon Glacier

In addition to offering the Whitewater Operating System 2.1 with support for Amazon Glacier and Google Cloud, the company rolled out larger virtual Whitewater appliances.

Riverbed has enhanced its Whitewater cloud storage lineup with an eye toward helping enterprises cost effectively meet crucial backup needs, modernize their data management strategies and tackle mounting challenges from data expansion.

At a New York City event Feb. 21, Riverbed unveiled its Whitewater Operating System 2.1 with support for Amazon Glacier and Google Cloud storage, a move aimed at lowering the cost of and easing enterprises' transition to the cloud.  

San Francisco-based Riverbed also announced larger virtual Whitewater appliances designed to support larger data sets, improve disaster recovery and manage multiple Whitewater appliances from a single window with a management console.

The new larger virtual Whitewater appliances, which allow customers to protect larger data sets and simplify disaster recovery, support local cache sizes of 4 or 8 terabytes and integrate with major data protection applications and cloud storage services. 

Whitewater's new OS and larger virtual appliances "drastically change the economics of data protection," said Jerome Noll, Riverbed marketing director. Whitewater will shrink data stored in the cloud by up to 30 times, on average, and thanks to Amazon Glacier, customers can store up to 100 terabytes of backup data for as little as $2,500 per year, he said.

While connecting to the cloud can seem daunting for some organizations, Whitewater and other storage gateway providers "offer an interface to get to the cloud," said Dan Iacono, research director for storage systems at IDC. The new Whitewater OS is "one of the first products [of its kind] to have a specific solution for Amazon Glacier," said Iacono, referring to its cost as "disruptively" low.

Announced last summer, Amazon Glacier offers secure, durable cloud storage for data archiving and backup with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Whitewater customers using Amazon Glacier cloud storage have immediate access to backup data at a price as low as 1 cent per gigabyte per month, approximately eight times cheaper than other currently available cloud storage offerings, Noll said. Amazon cloud storage services also offers high data durability and the ability to access data from any location via an Internet connection, and as a result helps boost customers' disaster recovery readiness.

Requested data will be returned in three to five hours. Whitewater caches the latest and frequently accessed data within the appliance and there will be a delay only if data is not within the cache, Noll said.

Tipper Tie, a producer of clips and clippers and a longtime Riverbed customer, has been testing the Whitewater 3010 appliance with Amazon Glacier. Tipper Tie was able to configure and move data to Glacier in 24 minutes, and it integrated well with the company's existing storage, said Drew Bartow, Tipper Tie's senior IT engineer.

Whitewater integrates seamlessly with most major data protection applications and does not require changes to existing backup policies, Noll said.

"We do everything to make the process as seamless as possible and to move data as quickly as possible to the cloud," he said.

A free trial is available at www.riverbed.com/whitewater.