Five Reasons to Conduct a Storage Assessment Today
As the cost of cloud storage continues to drop, interest in storing files in the cloud continues to grow exponentially, regardless of potential compliance issues that may arise.
The challenge, of course, is finding a way to access those files over a wide area network that by definition introduces a lot of latency into the storage equation. To solve that problem, Riverbed Technology developed Whitewater, a set of appliances that leverages the company’s variable segment deduplication technology specifically optimized for backup and archive workloads.
This week Riverbed extended the capabilities of its Whitewater platform via a new 10 Gigabit Ethernet Model 3030 appliance that is capable of supporting up to 14.4 petabytes of logical data.
According to Rich Faris, director of product management for Riverbed, customers are primarily taking advantage of cloud storage to replace tape-based backup systems. Naturally, the first issue they face is trying to transfer large amounts of data across the WAN, and then the challenge is trying to meet recovery time objectives in the event they need that data again.
Faris says that next up, Riverbed intends to add a policy engine to the Whitewater platform that will allow IT organizations to prioritize which data moves across the WAN based on how business-critical the application is.
The ability to access remote storage services is going to be a fundamental requirement across the enterprise as more IT resources are centralized in fewer data centers. The issue now is identifying the best way to do that when bandwidth on the WAN is not only a limited, expensive resource, but is also in very high demand.
