Riverbed debuts cloud transfer and storage appliances
Riverbed, the wide-area network optimisation company, has announced two new products, aimed at boosting the performance of applications and storage in the cloud.
Cloud Steelhead is a public cloud wide-area network (WAN) optimisation product. It optimises the rate of data throughput between virtualised, physical and mobile IT stacks and the public cloud to offer accelerated data transfer speeds. Whitewater is a disaster recovery storage and deduplication product for the cloud, sold in either virtualised or physical formats.
Cloud Steelhead works in tandem with existing Riverbed Steelhead appliances, Virtual Steelhead appliances and the Steelhead mobile client. "As long as you have two pieces of the Steelhead family on any end of the network you can get LAN-like performance wherever you may be," Apurva Dave, Riverbed's vice president of product marketing, said at a London press conference for the launch.
Currently, Cloud Steelhead can only be deployed in Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) products. However, according to Dave, "we will be aggressively expanding that footprint over time to many other products".
Paul Griffiths, a global consulting engineer for Riverbed, told ZDNet UK on Wednesday that the company had opted initially for AWS because it could deliver "the most footprint in the initial part of our product delivery". A UBS investment banking report from August identified AWS as being competitive in the public cloud field.
Griffiths said that migration to other services, such as Microsoft Azure, would not be difficult, as Riverbed has developed the core intellectual property (IP) for the product and migrating to other cloud services would be a case of "transplanting" rather than redeveloping the technology.
Like the Steelhead range, Whitewater uses WAN optimisation to boost the speed of backup to the cloud. It also encrypts the data during transit. When the information is in the cloud, it is encrypted with AES 256 encryption. When storage devices backup data to Whitewater, it appears to the devices as a CIFS or NFS filesystem, according to Riverbed.
Whitewater receives information, deduplicates it, then encrypts it before sending it through to the cloud storage environment, Griffiths told ZDNet UK. This means that the information must be decrypted before it is deduped, which carries a time cost, he said, although this is "insignificant" because of Whitewater's speed advantage that comes from using Riverbed's WAN optimisation technology.
Whitewater is compatible with storage environments based on Amazon S3, AT&T Synaptic Storage service and EMC Atmos. It currently integrates with the Symantec NetBackup and Backup Exec and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software packages.
Whitewater is available in three different configurations as a virtualised appliance, a physical appliance or a high storage physical appliance. Riverbed says that all of the Whitewater series are capable of average deduplication levels of 10 to 30-times compression. The virtualised appliance has a maximum LAN throughput of data of 200GB/h while the two physical appliances are capable of 1TB/h.
Both Whitewater and Cloud Steelhead are available in quarter four, 2010, Riverbed said. Pricing for the Cloud Steelhead starts at $250 (£155) per month. Pricing for Whitewater starts at £7,500.