Riverbed Extended Whitewater Cloud storage

Network vendor riverbed This week expanded the Whitewater cloud storage solution, adding new features and more partnerships. Whitewater was the first time Riverbed announced the introduction of hardware devices for storage acceleration in November 2010.

Eric Thacker, director of Riverbed product marketing, said: "We are extending different front-end and backend for whitewater." Cloud storage is now a hot topic, and many people want cloud storage to help them solve the problem of tape and customer-owned disks. ”

Thacker adds that cloud computing delivers a higher level of storage services at lower cost than local solutions. Still, there are problems with cloud storage. One of these is the speed at which data is stored in or out of the cloud. This is also the problem that Whitewater is addressing as a cloud storage acceleration technology.

The Whitewater solution is focused on customers who want to connect their existing data centers to the cloud but are unwilling to completely change the way the data center works. And riverbed now announces that they are broadening the base to take full advantage of whitewater benefits.

Whitewater has included accelerated and duplicate data deletion features specifically built for storage communications. By contrast, Riverbed's Steelhead series lineup is a more general WAN acceleration solution for all data types.

As part of the Whitewater product upgrade, riverbed upgraded the version number of its underlying storage-accelerated operating system to whitewater OS 1.1. The main difference between Whitewater OS 1.1 and the initial 1.0 is that the former extends support for third-party storage systems. When Whitewater first released, it can support Symantec NetBackup, EMC Atmos, IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager, and Amazon's S3 storage service. The upgraded whitewater can support EMC NetWorker, Quest Vranger, and CA arcserve Backup. Whitewater now also supports Nirvanix Storage IBuySpy Receptacle (SDN). "The benefit of this solution is that it enables customers to quickly upload data into the cloud and quickly download data from the cloud, which, in Nirvanix's view, is similar to putting a Ferrari front-end into our corporate cloud," says Steve Zivanic, vice president of marketing at Nirvanix. ”