Riverbed unveils SME cloud gateways

data, reports InformationWeek.

Uploading terabytes of data to public clouds - or, on the flip side, downloading them in a recovery situation - can be a time-consuming process. That's where Riverbed sees its opportunity - the company has expanded its Whitewater line-up of gateway devices for speeding up and securing those transfers.

Two of them - the WWA-510 and WWA-710 - were developed for SMEs, while the WWA-2010 model is intended for larger organisations.

The 510 and 710 models are actually descendants of Riverbed's earlier Whitewater 1000 device, which is no longer available. The company also offers a virtual version of its Whitewater hardware.

“With this release, we are being more explicit about Whitewater being referenced as a cloud storage gateway, rather than an accelerator,” says Eric Thacker, director of product marketing, cloud storage, at Riverbed, writes eChannelLine. “This is the next chapter of Whitewater.”

Thacker stresses that the re-branding is not just a feel-good marketing change. “We want to make sure customers don't confuse Steelhead which is an acceleration appliance with Whitewater, which is a Gataway appliance,” he said.

“There is some confusion as to whether Whitewater is a completely distinct product, and a lack of clarity about whether it's a symmetric device like the Steelhead or an asymmetric device. It does much more than an accelerator.”

The Whitewater 510 offers 3.5TB of local disk cache raw capacity, while the Whitewater 710 offers 7TB of local disk cache capacity, says Search Cloud Storage.com.

Both devices have RAID 6 protection. The maximum ingest rate for the 510 is 400GB an hour, while the ingest rate for the 710 is 600GB an hour.

Riverbed also upgraded the performance of its Virtual Whitewater software version so that it can ingest 250GB an hour rather than the initial 200GB an hour ingest rate. Virtual Whitewater runs on VMware ESX environments.

The 2010 appliance has 11TB of local disk capacity with RAID 6 protection and can ingest 1TB of data an hour.

Riverbed doesn't disclose pricing but it has tweaked the licensing for the 2010 appliance so that the baseline cloud storage capacity limit is higher in the 2010 vs the 2000.