Riverbed SteelStore Helps Wright-Pierce Use Cloud Storage

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced Wright-Pierce is using its SteelStore (formerly Whitewater) to reduce the cost of storing large volumes of data, to streamline backup and to accelerate recovery.

For Wright-Pierce, the combination of the SteelStorecloud storage gateway appliance with Amazon S3 is a better approach to storing its increasing amount of CAD, GIS and other engineering data compared to previous on-premises tape and disk-to-disk systems. Using SteelStore, Write-Pierce can take advantage of the cloud price wars and pays just hundreds of dollars per month to store 10TB of data.

Wright-Pierce is an engineering firm specializing in water, wastewater and infrastructure services for public and private clients. The firm is employee-owned with 200 engineers and support professionals located in seven offices. Wright-Pierce has been growing its business beyond the company’s Maine HQs southward to service the entire Northeast, increasing the amount of data that must be backed up and stored. Initially, the firm moved from tape backup to a disk-to-disk approach, but it was hard to control costs as the system had to keep expanding to handle growing amounts of data.

Ray Sirois, IT director, Wright-Pierce, realized that cloud storage offered a less expensive and elastic alternative to tape and disk-to-disk backup. As a long-time Riverbed customer, with Riverbed SteelHead appliances playing a key role in its expansion, Sirois was aware of the value Riverbed SteelStore technology could add to a cloud storage strategy: immediate data recovery for backup and archiving applications; data encryption in flight to the cloud and at rest with SSL v3; and 256-bit AES encryption and deduplication functionality to moderate the cost of cloud storage by shrinking the amount of data sent there. With a transition to SteelStore and cloud storage (in Amazon S3), the firm would deal with less backup hardware and be able to ensure a higher level of data security.

“We have a long history with Riverbed, and we’re very happy with Riverbed,” said Sirois. “Riverbed provides enabling technologies for us and has been a big part of our success over the last 10 years. Now, we have one small device in the rack compared to the four disk-to-disk devices we had before, and we’ve eliminated the need to add more. Storing data in the cloud means we don’t have to buy expensive equipment to keep up with our company’s growth, but we also don’t have to worry about buying too little and then having to go back and asking for money again. Another benefit of storing data in the cloud is a higher level of security than what you can provide at your own facilities.“

Wright-Pierce is benefitting from Amazon’s recent price reduction (from 7.5 cents/GB/month to 3 cents/GB/month) to store 10TB. No longer maintaining the tape and disk-to-disk backup systems is saving the company money, as is the fact that they can retire a NAS device and use some terabytess on the SteelStore appliance to house project archives. The SteelStore appliance consumes 80% less power than the four disk-to-disk devices. And, because it requires less rack space, the cooling requirement is lower as well.

Riverbed SteelStore and Application Performance Platform
The scalable cloud storage appliance reduces data protection and storage costs by up to 80%, provides immediate data access and integrates into existing infrastructures. With built-in replication capabilities, SteelStore provides instant data access at a second location while leveraging cost-effective cloud storage. By deploying SteelStore as part of data protection or archiving strategy, IT teams eliminate the headaches of tape-based systems, improve DR readiness, and integrate the cloud’s high data durability and declining pricing into their infrastructure to deliver increased flexibility and ROI within months. Named Product of the Year by Storage Magazine-SearchStorage.com in the category for backup hardware.

SteelStore is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform, a platform to enable organizations to embrace location-independent computing, so that business objectives – not technical constraints – drive how applications and data are delivered. The Application Performance Platform gives companies the flexibility to host applications and data in the locations that best serve the business while ensuring the flawless delivery of those apps to better leverage global resources, reduce the cost of running their business, and maximize employee productivity.