Riverbed intros cloud storage appliance Whitewater

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Riverbed Technology introduced the Riverbed Whitewater appliance, a cloud storage accelerator targeting back-up and select archive workloads.

The Whitewater appliance will initially provide a way to offsite data to cloud storage environments powered by EMC Atmos, AT&T Synaptic, and Amazon S3.

Also Read: Storage-as-a-service: Cloud Storage

The company claims that enterprises testing the Whitewater appliance have experienced back-up windows 35-40 percent shorter while completing full weekly backups, compared to their existing disk back-up infrastructure.

In performance tests conducted by analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group, restores from the cloud were executed with highly compressed ZIP files restoring at approximately 13 MB/sec, while deduplication-friendly vmdk files restored at a rate of 47 MB/sec with the Whitewater appliance.

The Whitewater appliance will extend Riverbed's deduplication capabilities to cloud storage.

The Whitewater appliance is compatible with existing back-up software, ensuring that enterprises can utilize cloud storage without any changes to their fine-tuned back-up software and processes.

The Riverbed Whitewater appliance is expected to be generally available in Q4 2010.