Riverbed Whitewater Upgrades Address Growing Cloud Storage Demand

Riverbed (RVBD) is answering the rising demand for cloud storage by debuting three new, larger Whitewater appliances—good news for service providers and solution providers looking for ways to help their customers move to the cloud in a sensible, cost-effective way.

The Whitewater 730, 2030 and 3030 appliances address the increase in customers moving more data to the cloud, thanks to a drop in pricing, said Rich Faris, director of Product Management at Riverbed.

“In the last six to 12 months since Amazon Glacier (cloud storage) came to market, its low price point coupled with government cutbacks have created an amazing demand for cloud storage in both the public and private sector,” Faris said. “Once it became cost-effective, we started seeing more demand from people with large amounts of data.”

Hence, the need for larger appliances. The 3030 is three times larger than Riverbed’s previously largest Whitewater appliance, he noted, and supports almost 15PB of backup and archive datasets. What’s more, the appliances feature a 10GB port, enabling 10GB throughput all the way to the Internet.

“These appliances address ingest performance—if you want to start a backup Friday night and have it done before Monday morning, you need to have more power and more capacity to make that happen,” he said. “We’re really enabling stuff that wasn’t available before.”

Also updated is the Whitewater OS, which now offers pairwise replication and pinning, two features that will benefit service providers and enterprises with large data sets, Faris said.

Pairwise replication basically enables two Whitewater appliances to be set up in different locations, with one acting as the primary and the other the secondary to enable immediate recovery in the event of an outage. “A single Whitewater connection to a disaster recovery location works great, but the latency of the connection to the cloud is involved in the disaster recovery, so sometimes immediate recovery is not available,” Faris said. “We built a system whereby a user can pair up boxes and back up to the primary and a copy to the secondary and then to the cloud. That way, if a primary fails the system can promote the secondary appliance to be the primary and still can pull the data down from the cloud.”

The pinning feature enables users to “pin” or keep in cache certain data shares that are used every time data is accessed, reducing latency. “Data put in the cloud is normally the least recently used, or old, data. With this technology companies can pin shares and then guarantee its place in the cache, which treats it as a local read. The most important stuff can be pinned in the cache,” he said.

Whitewater OS 3.0 is available now as a free download. The appliances also are available now, with price points ranging from $9,000 for a virtual version to north of $100,000 for the largest appliance, according to the company.