Riverbed Launches New Whitewater Operating System

Riverbed (RVBD) announced Whitewater Operating System (WWOS) version 2.1 and introduced larger virtual Whitewater appliances.

Riverbed's WWOS 2.1 has added support for Amazon Glacier storage and Google Cloud storage, so customers have immediate access to recent backup data. High data durability offered by Amazon cloud storage services and the ability to access the data from any location with an Internet connection greatly improves an organization's disaster recovery (DR) readiness.

"Once created, most unstructured data is rarely accessed after 30-90 days. Leveraging the cloud for storing these data sets makes a lot of sense, particularly given the attractive prices of storage services designed for long-term such as Amazon Glacier," said Dan Iacono, research director from IDC's storage practice. "The ability of cloud storage devices to cache locally and provide access to recent data provides real benefits from an operational cost perspective to avoid unnecessary transfer costs from the cloud."

New virtual Whitewater appliances support local cache sizes of four or eight terabytes and integrate seamlessly with leading data protection applications as well as all popular cloud storage services. The new WWOS 2.1 includes new management capabilities that enable monitoring and administration of all Whitewater devices from a single console with one-click drill down into any appliance.

"The features in WWOS 2.1 and the larger virtual appliances drastically change the economics of data protection," said Ray Villeneuve, vice president corporate development, at Riverbed. "With our advanced, in-line deduplication and optimization technologies, Whitewater shrinks data stored in the cloud by up to 30 times on average - for example, Whitewater customers can now store up to 100 terabytes of backup data that is not regularly accessed in Amazon Glacier for as little as $2,500 per year. The operational cost savings and high data durability from cloud storage services improve disaster recovery readiness and will continue to rapidly accelerate the movement from tape-based and replicated disk systems to cloud storage."