Making cloud storage a little less scary

You see it everywhere tech surveys are posted - people love the idea of cloud, but the implementation is sometimes a little too scary for many enterprises.

One of the issues that is often raised is that of vendor lock-in. Given that cloud is so new, customers either want the ability to multi-source cloud or quickly change cloud vendors without upending their entire IT delivery process.

With Riverbed's latest announcement about the Whitewater product family, I guess you could say we're doing our part to make cloud storage services a little more friendly to enterprises everywhere. First and foremost, we have added the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network to our list of supported cloud storage providers. That means we have a new, high performance, global platform of cloud storage data centers that customers can tap into as needed. Nirvanix - welcome to the Riverbed family of partners!

We also announced support for additional front-end backup software.  EMC NetWorker, CA ARCserve, and Quest vRanger Backup Tools are now supported in addition to Symantec NetBackup, BackupExec, and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. That means customers can start to leverage cloud with the software they already have in place, and don't have to change or adjust software based on the cloud that they choose. Moreover, if they decide to change backup software, they don't have to worry about their cloud strategy changing.

It's the combination of flexible cloud storage accelerators with market-leading partners like Nirvanix that we believe will drive cloud to be a reality for organizations everywhere. This announcement is one step in the right direction to make the implementation of cloud as appealing as the idea of it.