Riverbed Takes Cloud Storage to Higher Level

In the wake of a set of horrific attacks that took place 11 years ago today, the twin subjects of business continuity and disaster recovery became forever embedded into the IT consciousness. Arguably, it was those attacks that made research and development in these areas such an imperative. That research in turn helped lead to the development of cloud computing, which today is now being routinely used for backup and recovery applications.

In fact, not only are large amounts of data being backed up into the cloud, organizations now have the ability to dynamically invoke entire application environments on demand in the event of an emergency.

Against that backdrop, Riverbed Technology this week released a revamped version of its Whitewater cloud storage gateway, an appliance that uses wide area network (WAN) optimization technologies to speed up and simplify the backup process.

According to Riverbed Whitewater Cloud Storage General Manager Ray Villeneuve, version 2.0 of the company’s Whitewater software running on a new Whitewater 3010 model appliance can now support up to 32 TB of deduplicated local storage and 160 TB of deduplicated cloud storage. That new appliance can also ingest data at rates that are 50 percent faster than previous models, says Villeneuve. The reason for this, he says, is that the file I/O system in the latest release has been completely revamped.

What’s unique about the Riverbed approach, says Villeneuve, is that it only requires one appliance, versus other solutions that require an appliance in the branch office that needs to replicate data back to another appliance running in a data center in the cloud. That means that IT organizations don’t have to rip and replace the backup software and processes they currently have in place. Instead, they are just changing the backup target to the cloud, which Villeneuve says has the merits of being the least disruptive way to introduce cloud storage into an organization.

When it comes to business continuity and disaster recovery there have never been more options. But with all those options come greater expectations concerning uptime. In a perfect world, of course, we would never have need of these capabilities. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world.