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Riverbed Technology is expanding its Whitewater cloud storage portfolio to enable enterprises to handle larger backup data workloads with greater scalability and management capabilities.
Riverbed on Sept. 10 unveiled its Whitewater 3010 cloud storage gateway appliance, which offers four times the disk storage capacity-both onâpremise and in the cloud-and twice the memory of the company’s previous largest model, the Whitewater 2010, as well as the Whitewater Operating System (WWOS) 2.0, the latest version of its OS that will offer greater scalability and simplified management, according to Ray Villeneuve, general manager of Whitewater at Riverbed.
WWOS 2.0 has been in beta for several months, getting a strong embrace from businesses, Villeneuve told eWEEK. The software is generally available now.
The new appliance and upgraded operating system come as enterprise adoption of cloud storage is growing, with analysts at IDC expecting the basic public cloud storage space to grow 33.6 percent a year, to about $9.2 billion by 2015. Backup is a top usage model for public cloud storage, according to IDC, and gateway appliances are being used to enable enterprises to securely and efficiently leverage public clouds for data backup.
The move to using public clouds for backup is in the early stages, Villeneuve said, adding that the trends in enterprises-from securing data and driving costs down to improving service-level agreements (SLAs) to embracing the cloud-is shifting toward the idea of cloud storage backup “in a big, big way.”
Enterprises for years have relied on tape for back up and-more recently, replicated disk-based storage-but with the rapid growth in the amount of data being generated, these options are quickly becoming complex, expensive and risky for businesses worried about SLAs, he said. Cloud storage is becoming increasingly popular, particularly as cloud storage prices are dropping and scale and flexibility are available.
Riverbed officials said Whitewater appliances can help businesses reduce data backup costs by as much as 30 to 50 percent, and the systems can be deployed in less than an hour.
The Whitewater 3010 is the fifth cloud storage gateway appliance offered by Riverbed, and its biggest yet. The Whitewater 2010 offers 8 terabytes of capacity, 32 gigabytes of internal memory and a maximum ingest rate of 1.25TB per hour. The 3010 brings with its 32TB of capacity, 64GBs of memory and an ingest rate of up to 1.5TB per hour.
With WWOS 2.0, Riverbed officials said they are giving users simplified and efficient management capabilities through a host of new features, including greater support for large data backup blocks. When combined with the Whitewater 3010 appliance, the new operating system enables enterprises to support up to 32TB of deduplicated local storage and 160TB of deduplicated cloud storage, increasing capacity of 1.6 petabytes to 4.8 PB.
The OS also offers the Management Dashboard for real-time monitoring and reporting of cloud backup processes, remote and central management of one or more Whitewater appliances for everything from rebooting and shutting down systems to monitoring them, and proactive alerts that give IT administrators a heads-up when thresholds are close to being reached.
WWOS 2.0 also offers integration with Windows Active Directory for more streamlined operations and better security, according to company officials.
Riverbed’s rollout of its new Whitewater cloud storage gateway appliance and upgraded operating system comes two weeks after the company expanded its partnership with virtualization technology vendor VMware. At the VMworld 2012 show, Riverbed officials announced that the two companies were unveiling a performance management offering for software-defined networks (SDNs) through support in Riverbed’s Cascade product family for VXLAN technology.
In addition, Riverbed officials said their Steelhead Cloud Edition will be integrated with VMware’s vCloud Director solutions, enabling businesses to more easily enable WAN optimization in virtual data centers.
Riverbed and VMware also addressed virtual desktop infrastructures with a solution that combines Riverbed’s Granite edge virtual server infrastructure with VMware’s View technology. The two companies also announced the integration of Riverbed’s Stingray Traffic Manager-including the software and virtual application delivery controller-with VMware’s vFabric Application Director, a hybrid cloud application provisioning solution.
Riverbed Chief Marketing Officer David Green said it was important for Riverbed to push its vision for virtualization and cloud computing at VMware’s conference.
“In our mind, VMworld is where the industry comes together to talk about virtualization and to talk about the cloud,” Green told eWEEK.