Engineering Consulting Firm Psomas Deploys 11 Riverbed Whitewater

Riverbed Technology announced that Psomas, an engineering consulting firm, has
deployed 11 Riverbed
Whitewater cloud storage gateways across its offices in the western United
States to eliminate tape backup and speed its disaster recovery for
enhanced data protection.

With Whitewater gateways, Psomas has streamlined its
DR processes, protecting more data, more often, enabling faster recovery while
lowering TCOp. By reducing storage requirements by an
average of 22x with Whitewater gateways, Psomas has reduced
backup-related storage costs, operational burdens and complexity.

Psomas is an engineering consulting firm serving clients in the
transportation, water, site development, federal and energy markets across the
western United States.
The firm had previously used a tape backup process that was costly, cumbersome,
inefficient and labor-intensive.

Psomas Chief Information Officer Chris
Pinckney knew that, as a fast-paced engineering firm that regularly uses large
AutoCAD files, the company needed to consider alternatives to backup on tape.
After investigation, he chose a cloud storage infrastructure as the
means to simplify and enhance data protection, directly targeting his existing
Symantec Backup Exec to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) using Whitewater
gateways, all at a cost advantage of 30-50%.

"Psomas is like many other
organizations today dealing with exponential growth in data. Our use of large
AutoCAD files made tape backup too slow and painful to use as we continued to
grow," said Pinckney. "We
were able to simply drop Whitewater gateways into our environment to easily
optimize backup and take advantage of the scale and flexibility of the cloud
without any changes to our existing infrastructure."

With some initial configuration, the Whitewater gateway
was up and running in less than an hour. With Whitewater gateways, Psomas
deduplicates, compresses and encrypts backup data sets before storing them in a
local cache and securely accelerating them over the network to Amazon. Psomas
now experiences an average data reduction of 22x, reaching as high as 29x in
some locations, saving the company network transmission costs and storage costs
in the Amazon S3 cloud. "This
solution significantly reduces the data size we have to send to the public
cloud. Not only does this provide significant cost savings, but it also speeds
replication to our cloud storage provider and makes recovery quick and easy to
any location, which greatly enhances our data protection," added
Pinckney.

Psomas is now more confident in its ability to recover its data in
hours should a disaster occur, instead of days or weeks with tape. The secure
disk cache in Whitewater gateways provides Psomas with instant local access to
the most recent backup data sets. In cases where data is recovered from the
cloud, restores and DR are now faster than with the manual process of locating
and recovering tape from offsite vaults and pulling the backup data from the
correct tapes.

Whitewater gateways have also provided Psomas with flexibility in managing IT
resources. If Psomas decides to change cloud service providers or backup tools,
Whitewater gateways can accommodate this change. "It’s quite flexible for the future, as it’s
scalable and works with multiple cloud providers and most backup tools,"
concluded Pinckney.