Riverbed Technology has expanded its Whitewater line of cloud storage gateways, improving the power of the line’s operating system and adding a new hardware appliance with four times the local storage capacity.
The Whitewater devices act as a backup to backup servers, locally de-duping, compressing and encrypting data before sending it to a cloud storage provider.
The company said Monday that the line’s Linux-based operating system, called WWOS, has a new 64-bit files system, management dashboard that improves real-time monitoring of data flow, a hash-based deduplication algorithm, integrates with Windows Active Directory and can now index all data sent to the cloud – the previous version only indexed data stored on the Whitewater appliance.
Ray Villeneuve, Riverbed’s general manager of the Whitewater line, also said in an interview that the new operating system includes new “lights-out management features,” including support for IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface). That allows administrators the ability to remotely power up or reboot Whitewater appliances.
All current model Whitewater appliances can run the WWOS 2.0, and is a free upgrade to customers on a support contract.
The operating system is certified for a number of cloud storage providers, including Telus Communications Corp. in Canada, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
Also introduced Monday is the latest top of the line model 3010, which leverages the improved OS to offer faster handling of data, offering up to 64 terrabytes of weekly full backup, compared to 16 TB of the model 2010.
(Whitewater 3010)
The Whitewater line, introduced at the end of 2010, spans from a virtual appliance that runs on VMware Inc.’s ESX hypervisor to four hardware appliances.
Whitewater appliances, which are sold by Riverbed storage and networking partners in Canada and the U.S., range in price from US$7,995 for the virtual version and up.
For example, the Whitewater 510 holds 2 TB of data, while the 3010 holds 32 TB.
In addition there’s a cloud storage licence with four levels of pricing that varies by the amount of cloud storage needed. For example the 510 can forward between 4 and 10 TB of data to the cloud, while the 3010 can forward 64 to 160 TB.
Villeneuve didn’t detail the licencing pricing.