New Riverbed Whitewater Appliances and OS

Riverbed Technology, Inc. has expanded its Whitewater cloud storage appliance family with the addition of new hardware models and upgrades to its OS.

The new Riverbed Whitewater appliances and OS provide more capacity, faster ingest speeds and more replication options. These features and capabilities make the new Whitewater appliances a component for enterprises wishing to leverage the economical price and reliability of cloud storage options such as Amazon Glacier.

Enhancements include new Whitewater model appliances with up to triple the cache of previous models and support of up to 14.4PB of logical data.

The Whitewater OS (WWOS) 3.0 also offers new features, including pairwise replication that enable enterprises to replicate to an additional Whitewater appliance at a secondary location. In addition, enterprises can now leverage the 10GbE networking interface that improves ingest performance.

“We needed to replace our tape-based backup with a more efficient and scalable solution that could handle seismic data from our global operations and the new Whitewater cloud storage 3030 model appliance shocked us with really great results,” said Bradley Lauritsen, director of exploration applications, Apache Corporation, a Houston, TX-based oil and gas exploration and production company with operations globally. “The Whitewater appliance transforms our ability to backup and recover by improving our IT efficiency for protecting seismic data while delivering significant cost savings. We now feel confident that even in locations where connection speeds are slow, we can maintain continuous operations with the new WWOS 3.0.”

Cloud storage has become a more attractive option for backup and archiving as it has become more economical and reliable, with options such as Amazon Glacier, which offers pricing as low as a penny per gigabyte each month and is designed to have average annual durability of 99.999999999% for an archive. In fact, customers that deploy the Whitewater 3030 model appliance can save more than $750,000 over a three year period when backing up to Amazon Glacier. With varying requirements for RTO of certain data sets, the ability to recover certain data sets locally and immediately has also become increasingly important.

“Disk-to-disk backup architectures have become extremely popular in the last few years. Adding the ability to integrate public cloud storage into this architecture offers an immediate return to operations at a DR site while capturing the cost advantages of very aggressive cloud storage services such as Amazon Glacier,” said Laura DuBois, program VP, storage, IDC. “Riverbed is focused on helping enterprise customers achieve the immediate recovery they require and helping them reduce operations costs by riding the curve of rapidly decreasing cloud storage price points.”

Pairwise Replication and Pinning
for Faster Recovery Options
The new WWOS 3.0 offers support for pairwise replication for Whitewater appliances that allows enterprises flexibility to choose the appropriate recovery option to meet their RTO based on their BC plans. For the fastest RTO, a Whitewater appliance can recover at disk speed to a secondary site. In addition, the new OS offers a pinning feature that allows enterprises to tier and choose which backup data sets are available on the Whitewater appliance cache for access, while less critical backup data sets can be recovered from the cloud.

Scalable to Meet Growing Data Sets
The three new Whitewater model (730, 2030, 3030) appliances offer between 8 to 96TB usable cache capacity. The largest model, WWA-3030, can cache up to three times the amount of data as the previous largest model (3010) and can support backup & archive datasets of up to 14.4PB before it is compressed and deduplicated onto the local cache.

Faster Ingest Speeds and 10GbE Networking Interface Support
For faster performance, enterprises can also choose to use 10GbE networking interfaces to get up to 2.5TB/hour ingest performance, a 40% increase over previous models. The 10GbEt networking interface also enables enterprises to transfer to Amazon Glacier cloud storage leveraging Amazon Direct Connect.

“As public cloud storage costs continue to fall, customers are looking to move new and larger data sets into the cloud. Our new generation of Whitewater cloud storage appliances expands scalability and performance to meet customer requirements,” said John Martin, SVP and GM, storage delivery business unit, Riverbed. “In addition to helping customers ingest, protect and store more data, the new WWOS 3.0 features, such as replication, improve customers’ DR initiatives by offering immediate recovery at a DR location should their primary system suffer a significant outage. These capabilities greatly expand the number of organizations that can implement cloud storage while tailoring RTO to their unique requirements.”

Whitewater is a purpose built storage appliance, optimized for data protection and archiving, that helps integrate organizations’ cloud storage infrastructures to deliver instant recovery, end to end security, and a cost-effective storage for backup and archive data. Leveraging the cloud as a safe, secure site for storage, the appliances streamline IT management and allow organizations to pay only for what they use, eliminating constant hardware refreshes and capital outlays.

WW0S 3.0 is available and a free upgrade for all existing Whitewater customers under a support agreement allowing them to take advantage of the new features and enhancing their investment in Whitewater appliances. Whitewater model 730, 2030, 3030 appliances are available.