Welcome to the Cloud Storage Gateway Market

Amazon is an excellent cloud storage partner of Riverbed Whitewater.  Riverbed Whitewater gateways and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) are tested and proven in production environments at many mutual customers today. 

While both offerings fit into the broad category of cloud storage gateway products, Whitewater is an industrial grade, optimized solution purpose built for data protection that supports all leading data protection software applications.  This optimization includes substantial engineering investment around backup applications that enable Whitewater to achieve higher levels of deduplication and performance compared to general purpose iSCSI based gateways.  Whitewater leverages Riverbed’s proven byte level deduplication and WAN optimization technologies that greatly reduce the size of the cloud data stored and therefore, monthly storage costs, in addition to speeding the transmission to and from the cloud.

Security is a top concern of our customers and Whitewater secures the data using strong encryption within the gateway itself and during transport to the cloud.  Further, the encryption key is kept safe and under customers’ control in their data center which eliminates concerns about the cloud storage vendors’ or a rogue third party’s access to the data.  Riverbed’s approach is far more secure than Amazon’s gateway where key storage and encryption are both done within the Amazon cloud.

Freedom of choice is a common request from our customers and Whitewater delivers in its support of all leading cloud storage providers.  Riverbed provides this flexibility as well as the ability to deploy either virtual or physical gateway appliances.  Riverbed’s industry recognized support – available 24x7 addresses the needs of the most demanding enterprises and ensures fast response should an issue arise.    

We welcome Amazon’s entry into the cloud storage gateway market with their recent announcement as we feel this will accelerate the market.   Customers interested in a production quality gateway for data protection will no doubt see the many advantages of Whitewater.