New cloud storage technology expands scalability and performance
San Francisco-based storage specialist Riverbed Technology has announced an expansion of its Whitewater cloud storage appliance family with the launch of new hardware and updates to its operating system. These provide greater capacity, faster speeds and more replication options.
The latest models have up to triple the cache of previous versions and can support up to 14.4 petabytes of logical data. Enhancements to the Whitewater Operating System (WWOS 3.0) include a 10 gigabit network interface and the ability to pair devices in order to replicate data to another location making it ideal for real-time backups and hot recovery sites and for integrating with public cloud services.
Cloud storage has become a more attractive option for backup and archiving thanks to increased reliability and economy, 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 percent 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.
"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 disaster recovery site while capturing the cost advantages of very aggressive cloud storage services such as Amazon Glacier," says Laura DuBois, program vice president, storage at 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".
Because the new WWOS 3.0 offers support for pairwise replication for Whitewater appliances it allows enterprises greater flexibility to choose the appropriate recovery option based on their business continuity plans. For the fastest recovery time objectives, 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 choose which backup data sets are available on the Whitewater appliance cache for immediate access, while less critical data sets can be recovered from the cloud.
The three new Whitewater model (730, 2030, 3030) appliances offer between 8 to 96 TB of usable cache capacity. The largest model, WWA-3030, can cache up to three times the amount of data as the previous largest model and can support backup & archive datasets of up to 14.4 petabytes.
"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," says John Martin, senior vice president and general manager, Storage Delivery Business Unit at Riverbed.
The new hardware is available now and WWOS 3.0 is a free upgrade to existing users under their support agreements. For more information you can visit the Whitewater section of the Riverbed site.
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