Riverbed Launches New Whitewater Appliances

Riverbed (RVBD) announced new hardware models and upgrades to its operating system on the Whitewater cloud storage appliance family. New Whitewater model appliances have up to triple the cache of previous models and support of up to 14.4 petabytes of logical data. The Whitewater Operating System (WWOS) 3.0 also offers new features, including pairwise replication that enable enterprises to replicate to an additional Whitewater appliance at a secondary location.

“We needed to replace our tape-based backup with a more efficient and scalable solution that could handle seismic data from our global operations and the new Whitewater cloud storage 3030 model appliance shocked us with really great results,” said Bradley Lauritsen, director of exploration applications, at Apache Corporation, a Houston-based oil and gas exploration and production company with operations globally. “The Whitewater appliance transforms our ability to backup and recover by improving our IT efficiency for protecting seismic data while delivering significant cost savings. We now feel confident that even in locations where connection speeds are slow, we can maintain continuous operations with the new WWOS 3.0.”

Support for pairwise replication for Whitewater appliances is new in version 3 of the Whitewater Operating System, which gives enterprises greater flexibility to choose the appropriate recovery option to meet their RTO based on their business continuity plans. The new OS offers a pinning feature that allows enterprises to tier and choose which backup data sets are available on the Whitewater appliance cache for immediate access, while less critical backup data sets can be recovered from the cloud.

As a a purpose built storage appliance, optimized for data protection and archiving the three new Whitewater model (730, 2030, 3030) appliances offer between 8 to 96 TB usable cache capacity. For faster performance, enterprises can also choose to use 10 gigabit networking interfaces to get up to 2.5 terabytes per hour ingest performance, a 40 percent increase over previous models. The 10 gigabit networking interface also enables enterprises to transfer to Amazon Glacier cloud storage leveraging Amazon Direct Connect.

“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,” said John Martin, senior vice president and general manager, Storage Delivery Business Unit at Riverbed. “In addition to helping customers ingest, protect and store more data, the new WWOS 3.0 features, such as replication, improve customers’ disaster recovery initiatives by offering immediate recovery at a disaster recovery location should their primary system suffer a significant outage. These capabilities greatly expand the number of organizations that can implement cloud storage while tailoring RTO to their unique requirements.”