Ricoh Taps Riverbed SteelStore

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced that Ricoh Company, Ltd., a Japanese multinational imaging and electronics company, has adopted its SteelStore cloud storage gateway products to backup data from the company’s mission-critical systems, allowing the company to use the cloud as a cost-effective storage tier.

SteelStore improves backup and recovery performance, and its deduplication, compression and encryption features reduce storage costs while maintaining data security in the cloud.

Ricoh was faced with the same storage challenges many companies face. As data grows, so does the cost of backing it up. Using tape or disk is time-consuming and costly, and DR strategies are often not cost-effective or geared for immediate data recovery.

Ricoh management transformation division, which manages systems infrastructure for all the companies within the group, wanted a backup system that could provide a ROI company-wide. Cloud storage offered cost-effective backup, reliability, and fast recovery, and Ricoh decided to deploy SteelStore to backup mission-critical systems at the corporate office to HP Cloud Object Storage.

Through deduplication, SteelStore reduced the volume of data needing to be backed up by 90%. With less data traveling over the network, backup time was reduced. The virtual capabilities of SteelStore also reduced total backup costs by letting Ricoh start small to minimize deployment costs; then accelerated backup by moving only the right data at the right time. This flexibility allows companies to get started right away without making major changes to existing backup systems and the way they operate.

Ricoh can use its existing Internet environment without a VPN or other services since SteelStore encrypts data in transit using SSL v3. Data at rest is encrypted using AES 256-bit. Even in the unlikely case of data being decrypted, security is maintained since the data itself is fragmented and de-duplicated, preventing the original data from being reproduced by third parties. This ensures data security and integrity when using the public cloud. Additionally, SteelStore allows Ricoh to instantly restore data in a separate location if the data center is affected by a disaster.

“Moving to cloud storage for backup and recovery has dramatically reduced costs associated with protecting critical data,” said Toshiyuki Miyakoshi, senior specialist for system infrastructure section at the information infrastructure control department, Ricoh’s management transformation division. “Riverbed SteelStore allows us to leverage the benefits of cloud backup and provides reassurance that data is both backed up and easily accessible.“

SteelStore and the Riverbed Application Performance Platform
SteelStore integrates cloud storage into a company’s existing infrastructure to streamline data protection and reduce risk while reducing storage and data protection costs by up to 80%. With built-in replication capabilities, it provides instant data access at a second location while leveraging the industry’s most cost-effective cloud storage. By deploying SteelStore as part of a company’s data protection or archiving strategy, IT teams eliminate the headaches of tape-based systems, improve DR readiness and integrate the cloud’s data durability and declining pricing into their infrastructure to deliver increased flexibility and ROI within months. SteelStore was named Product of the Year by Storage MagazineSearchStorage.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.