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IT performance specialist Riverbed Technology announced the introduction of three Whitewater cloud storage gateway models designed to optimize data protection. Whitewater now allows a wider range of organizations, including small to midsize businesses, to take advantage of the benefits of cloud data protection.
The Whitewater models 510 and 710 are purpose-built for SMBs, while Model 2010 is designed for the midsize enterprise and targeted use cases in the large enterprise. In addition to hardware-based cloud storage gateway appliances, Riverbed also offers a virtual version of its cloud storage gateway for data protection.
With the Whitewater cloud storage gateway, restores of recent backups occur locally from the secure disk cache. Also, older data can be pulled directly from the cloud. The gateway will then manage the network and storage deduplication, compression, encryption and transmission of the data stream to local disk cache and the cloud, as well as provide the data to the backup application when a restore is required. The platform also provides Secure Sockets Layer version 3 (SSLv3) encryption for data in motion and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit at rest.
“As many organizations are grappling with the explosion in data growth in their IT environments, cloud storage has emerged as an attractive data protection option. SMBs can quickly and easily add offsite protection capabilities, but only pay for storage as needed and without investing in or managing a secondary data center,” said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst with IT research firm Enterprise Strategy Group. “As enterprises increase their use of server virtualization and implement other strategic IT initiatives, the growth and the sheer volume of data present a greater challenge for data protection strategies. With these new Whitewater models, Riverbed provides a data protection solution that helps organizations accelerate recovery times, drive down the cost of backup and improve disaster recovery (DR).”
Whitewater cloud storage gateways deduplicate, compress and encrypt backup data sets before storing them in the local cache and securely accelerating them over the network and into the cloud. This helps free up backup staff from tape backup and tape infrastructure management with no disruption to their operations, the company said. In the event of a disaster, the secure cloud copy can be restored to any location and provides a strong DR solution without the need to purchase and maintain expensive hardware in remote locations.
The gateways also enable organizations to securely optimize their backup with pay-per-use pricing and without changes to their existing infrastructure. In addition, Whitewater cloud storage gateways provide drop-in access to the major public cloud storage providers with local-like performance and connect directly to most backup tools.
“As a fast-paced engineering consulting firm that regularly uses large AutoCAD files, you can imagine the kind of challenge it created for our data protection strategies,” said Chris Pinckney, chief information officer at Psomas. “With Whitewater, we no longer have to deal with high volumes of tapes for backup, and were able to streamline our data protection processes with a few clicks of a mouse, while decreasing our costs tremendously. Most importantly, we’re able to securely protect more data faster and recover just as fast.”