Riverbed Intros Major Upgrade To Whitewater Cloud Storage

The new appliance and operating system will help Riverbed bring its cloud-based data protection platform into more enterprise customers, said Jerome Noll, cloud storage marketing director for the Fremont, Calif.-based vendor.

"Our primary value proposition is to eliminate, tap and increase disaster recovery capabilities while helping customers reduce costs by leveraging the cloud as a disaster recovery site," Noll said.

[Related: Riverbed Granite: Centralized Data Served Fast To The Edge ]

Riverbed unveiled a new version of its Whitewater Operating System.

WWOS 2.0 is now a 64-bit file system, a significant upgrade from the prior version, which was based on a 32-bit file system, Noll said.

WWOS 2.0 also now supports deep backup integration with applications such as those developed by Veeam, which can start a virtual machine from a backup job. Also new is support for Windows Active Director and for lights-out management, as well as a new graphical user interface for granular reporting.

Also new is the Whitewater 3010, the latest version of the company's Whitewater storage appliance family.

The Whitewater family of appliances is an on-site device for backing up data. They also provide on-line data protection by immediately replicating backup data to a storage cloud, Noll said.

The Whitewater 3010 includes 32 TB of local disk cache, or four times the 8-TB capacity of the previous top-line model, the Whitewater 2010. It also includes a license for 64 TB to 160 TB of cloud storage, Noll said.

The appliance also provides in-line deduplication, compression and encryption of the data before it is move on to the storage cloud, he said.

Riverbed's Whitewater storage appliances work with private clouds built on OpenStack or EMC Atmos technologies and on such public clouds as Amazon Web Services, AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service, HP Cloud Services, Nirvanix, Rackspace and Microsoft's Windows Azure.

The new Whitewater 3010 is available, and like all Whitewater cloud storage appliances it is available mainly through indirect channel partners.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 14, 2012