Riverbed Technology announced the introduction of three new Riverbed Whitewater cloud storage gateway models designed to optimize data protection. Whitewater will now allow a wider range of organizations, including small and medium businesses (SMBs), to take advantage of the benefits of cloud data protection. The new Whitewater models 510 and 710 are purpose-built for SMBs, while the Whitewater model 2010 is designed for the mid-sized enterprise and targeted use cases in the large enterprise. With the release of the new models, Whitewater cloud storage gateways can now better meet the data protection needs of organizations across a wider range of sizes and industries, to reduce operational burdens, costs and complexity when using public cloud storage for data protection. In addition to hardware-based cloud storage gateway appliances, Riverbed also offers a virtual version of its cloud storage gateway for data protection.

"As many organizations are grappling with the explosion in data growth in their IT environments, cloud storage has emerged as an attractive data protection option. SMBs can quickly and easily add offsite protection capabilities, but only pay for storage as needed and without investing in or managing a secondary data center," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "As enterprises increase their use of server virtualization and implement other strategic IT initiatives, the growth and the sheer volume of data present a greater challenge for data protection strategies. With these new Whitewater models, Riverbed provides a data protection solution that helps organizations accelerate recovery times, drive down the cost of backup and improve disaster recovery (DR)."

Whitewater cloud storage gateways enable organizations to easily and securely optimize their backup, while allowing them to reap the benefits of the public cloud's economies of scale, flexibility, scalability and pay-per-use pricing, without changes to their existing infrastructure. Whitewater cloud storage gateways provide fast, drop-in access to the major public cloud storage providers with local-like performance and connect directly to most popular backup tools. With the introduction of Whitewater cloud storage gateway models 510, 710 and 2010, Riverbed enables a wider range of enterprises and federal agencies to significantly reduce storage requirements by embracing the benefits of cloud storage for data protection.

"As a fast-paced engineering consulting firm that regularly uses large AutoCAD files, you can imagine the kind of challenge it created for our data protection strategies," said Chris Pinckney, chief information officer at Psomas. "With Whitewater, we no longer have to deal with high volumes of tapes for backup, and were able to streamline our data protection processes with a few clicks of a mouse, while decreasing our costs tremendously. Most importantly, we're able to securely protect more data faster and recover just as fast."

Whitewater cloud storage gateways deduplicate, compress and encrypt backup data sets before storing them in the local cache and securely accelerating them over the network and into the cloud. This frees backup staff from labor-intensive tape backup and tape infrastructure management with no disruption to their operations. In the event of a disaster, the secure cloud copy can be restored to any location and provides a strong DR solution without the need to purchase and maintain expensive hardware in remote locations.

Some of the key differentiators of the Whitewater cloud storage gateway solutions include the ability to:

• Protect More Data More Often, and Recover Faster
  Recovery from disasters using tape can span many days, with organizations obliged to request tape retrieval, wait for delivery, load tapes and search for the required data before being able to recover data. With the Whitewater cloud storage gateway, restores of recent backups occur locally from the secure disk cache. Also, older data can be pulled directly from the cloud to dramatically improve recovery of anything from a file or more, reducing the recovery time from days to hours.
• Seamlessly Integrate Without Disruption
  Whitewater cloud storage gateways install quickly and easily in less than an hour, requiring only a simple change of the existing backup application disk storage target to the cloud storage gateway solution. The Whitewater cloud storage gateway will then manage the network and storage deduplication, compression, encryption and transmission of the data stream to local disk cache and the cloud, as well as provide the data to the backup application when a restore is required, without the need for user intervention.
• Reduce IT Management Cost and Time
  Cumbersome and inefficient tape backup operations can be bypassed completely, freeing up time, labor and investment for more productive uses.
• Reduce Costs by Reducing Storage Requirements by 10-30x, on Average
  Leveraging industry-leading in-line network and storage deduplication, Whitewater cloud storage gateways cut the cost of data protection by reducing the amount of storage required to store backup workloads in the public cloud by 10-30 times, on average. As an added benefit, Whitewater cloud storage gateways also minimize the bandwidth required and the transmission costs of moving data to or from the public cloud and cost of maintenance.
• Protect Securely with Dual-Level Encryption for End-to-End Security
  Whitewater cloud storage gateway solutions provide Secure Socket Layer version 3 (SSLv3) encryption for data in motion and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit at rest. This dual-level encryption helps ensure that any data moved into cloud storage is not compromised and creates end-to-end security.
• Overcome Vendor Lock-In
  Whitewater cloud storage gateway solutions provide the flexibility to work with the leading cloud storage providers and most popular backup applications. As a result, organizations are able to off-site data to multiple locations or transition to different cloud providers as economics or needs change.

"We are bringing the power of a high-performance, secure and flexible cloud storage gateway to our SMB customers to tap into the tremendous benefits of using the public cloud for data protection," said Apurva Davé, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed. "These new offerings will help SMBs, in addition to larger organizations, leverage Riverbed Whitewater cloud storage gateways to overcome barriers to cloud storage adoption, including performance, security and vendor lock-in. This enables a wider range of organizations to better compete without having to build and maintain a high-capital, high-maintenance infrastructure."

Whitewater cloud storage gateway for data protection models 510, 710, 2010 and virtual edition are generally available today.