The Riverbed Blog

Demo of Riverbed's Performance Platform

This short demo covers Riverbed's Cascade, Stingray Traffic Manager, Stingray Aptimizer, Steelhead / Akamai SaaS acceleration, and Whitewater products through the lens of Microsoft SharePoint.

 

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.

The old ideas are still the best

It often seems that there are few really new ideas in computers. There are many, many interesting technologies, novel approaches, and effective products -- but when examined closer, most are old ideas in a few form.

Take CPU architecture. The very first CPUs were RISC-type machines, but were severely-limited by the technology available. Limited RAM, and slow access times, meant it was advantageous to perform as much work as possible without accessing RAM. So we got CISC architecture. But as hardware improved, RISC architectures came to the fore again. It seemed new to many engineers, but was simply an idea whose time had come.

Another example is Cloud Computing. Often mistaken as a new idea, of course it's actually a very old idea. 1950s science fiction is replete with visions of centralized computing. Take Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451, a dystopian novel about the future. It features a centralized, interactive, video distribution system (admittedly used to distract the populace, and keep it content!).

So while Cloud Computing is an old idea -- as are the problems of insufficient bandwitdh and high latencies that go with it -- Riverbed has new solutions for these problems. The Riverbed Cloud Steelhead allows enterprises to overcome these problems, giving end-users LAN-like performance access to services and data located in the Cloud.  The Whitewater Cloud Storage Gateway allows you to eliminate dependence on unreliable, error-prone tape systems for backup and DR Eliminate tape and enjoy the benefits of cloud backup with a Whitewater cloud storage gateway.

It often seems to me that if one wants to learn the best technical approaches, one needs to look back, not forward. History is full of ideas which are just waiting for engineering ability to catch up. And Riverbed's engineers have now caught up and are helping those visions become a reality, allowing enterprises to deliver services to their end-users, in an efficient and secure manner.

Riverbed Steelhead & Whitewater Customers Featured at Gartner Conference

Gartner will kick off its 30^th Data Center Conference amongst the glitz and glamour of beautiful Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas next week. Leading Gartner analysts such as Joe Skorupa will be covering hot issues including next-stage virtualization, the impact of cloud computing, mobility, best practices in cost optimization, managing escalating energy costs, the aging infrastructure. Additionally Riverbed customers James Hardie,  a world leader in fiber cement siding, and Psomas, a Southern-Calif.-based engineering consulting firm will present on how they are leveraging Riverbed IT performance solutions to enhance its disaster recovery capabilities.

Featured at the conference is a track titled, “Twin Goals, Unique Approaches:  Improving Data Replication, Back-Up and Storage - With the Cloud, and Without”, where Riverbed customers James Hardie and Psomas will share their IT success stories with their peers. If you’re at the conference, be sure to check out the session on Wednesday, December 7 from 11:15 - 11:45 a.m.

Here’s a bit more information:

Twin Goals, Unique Approaches:  Improving Data Replication, Back-Up and Storage - With the Cloud, and Without

For James Hardie, data protection and Disaster Recovery are paramount. So SAP data replication and failover that were running a day behind and nightly data backup replication of 18 hours+ constituted an untenable situation. Deduplication alone was not enough to improve end-to-end performance. Learn how the company has deployed WAN optimization from Riverbed Technology to reduce its RPO to one hour or less, slash backup times by almost 3X and improve bandwidth utilization from 30% to nearly 100%.

For Psomas, eliminating tape and leveraging cloud based backup and recovery are an IT priority. Cost reduction, improved business continuity, freeing administrative time for more high value activities, and achieving competitive advantage were just a few of the factors motivating the change. Learn how the company has deployed Riverbed Technology’s Whitewater cloud storage gateway and Cloud Steelhead WAN optimization technology to move to a hybrid cloud model for CAD computing that best serves its highly mobile and distributed workforce.

And please stop by our booth #30 during the show. Happy Holidays!

Video: Application Performance in the Cloud

Bob Gilbert sits down with Zeus Kerravala from the Yankee Group to discuss application performance in the cloud.

 

 

Riverbed Technical Leader Steve Riley Q&A on Distributed Recentralization

Thank you for tuning in to the Federal IT Q&A series with Steve Riley, our friend for all things cloud. With this episode, we're wrapping up the series with one question and one answer. 

The question: what does the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, Cloud First policy, data protection, mobility and telework, and desktop virtualization, have in common?

The answer: Distributed recentralization. In the below video, Steve provides a history on the computing models we've experienced (i.e., mainframe, client-server and centralized computing), and talks about the direction we're moving towards - distributed recentralization. The trend is that we're moving to fewer but larger data centers. And, compared to centralized computing (creation, access and process happening in one place), with distributed decentralization, access and creation are happening in one place, and processing and storage are happening in another place. Also, with fewer data centers, these two activities are occurring at even greater distances in the past ten years. 

This is why adding a layer of intelligence to networks is critical.

 

Actually, there is one more question. What topics — within the realm of IT performance — would you like to see from us?  

 

Riverbed in Austin, Texas at Dell World 2011

If you plan to attend Dell World from October 12–14 in Austin, Texas, then come and visit the Riverbed booth to learn about Riverbed and Dell solutions that enable customers to optimize the performance of their IT infrastructure.

As businesses, from SMB to large enterprises, continue to innovate the way they do business and adopt leading solutions for virtualization and cloud, CIOs are examining cost-effective technologies to satisfy their requirements. Moving data and applications to the cloud, data center to data center replication and disaster recovery are all key initiatives affected by virtualization and cloud computing.

Riverbed and Dell have been collaborating as strategic partners to bring IT performance solutions to customers. Specifically, Riverbed Steelhead products with Dell EqualLogic storage help optimize WAN-based iSCCI data replication. Have a read at the solution brief here. And, Riverbed Steelhead with Dell Compellent storage, delivers accelerated disaster recovery operations and increased data protection. Read more in the Compellent and Riverbed solution brief.

How are have customers deployed Riverbed and Dell, together? Here are some customer examples, from Minnwest Bank and Constangy, Brooks, & Smith, LLP.

 

Is Cloud Reality Beginning to Take Hold?

As I’ve been out talking to people about using the public cloud as a target for data protection, I continue to be surprised by how much pain many organizations regularly go through for backup and recovery, as well as the variety of methods used to protect company data. Of course, the old standby is tape, and even in my days at Data Domain, where the mantra “Tape Sucks” was like a religion, everyone was predicting the rapid demise of that 1928 invention’s role in IT. And yes, tape has lost some if its place in the market for data protection, but it continues to hang around, despite all of the pain that I hear from IT professionals about it.

Why? There are probably as many theories about that as who shot Kennedy but I think it is safe to say that tape holds on for a couple of reasons:

• Disk is still relatively expensive, even if deduped, and still complex to manage
• Some (not the majority of) regulatory requirements can best be filled by tape
• Tape is a known quantity, familiar, “better the devil you know” and all that

So people seem to make do, kludging together a patchwork of solutions to keep ahead of that dreaded backup window, often at the expense of any kind of DR planning. In fact, for most SMBs and SMEs, data protection is only a secondary part of someone’s IT job. So it doesn’t always get attacked with the same vigor and focus as other IT issues. Like I said, people make do.

But that is changing. I’ve been seeing people start to take a look at the potential of doing away with all the cost and hassle of standard data protection solutions and replacing it with the public cloud. I know about all the hype about “The Cloud” but over the course of this year, the view of the cloud I’ve seen has become more measured, with people asking deeper questions about the implications of using the cloud. For storage in particular, professionals are starting to see that not all storage lends itself as easily to the cloud. The performance implications and management difficulties of moving primary storage to the cloud has tripped up both trial customers and solution providers and has strengthened the focus for cloud storage on functions such as backup and archiving, which are much better suited for the cloud in terms of performance requirements and storage methodologies. And the majority of people in that camp are looking to jettison the shackles of tape backup and adopt cloud storage.

Mainstream backup solutions are also promoting the extension of data protection to the public cloud. Last week, I wrote about IBM recently releasing a video showing how the Riverbed® Whitewater® cloud storage gateway enables Tivoli Storage Manger users to deploy a drop-in Whitewater appliance and essentially convert all the headaches of managing a backup infrastructure into freed up capital and hours that can be spent on more pressing IT needs.

I’m sure there will be some data protection issues for which tape is a compelling solution, at least for the near future. But there’s a reason you don’t find 8-track or cassette players in cars anymore, nor video tapes available from movie rental outfits. It’s also getting more difficult to find outfits that rent hard copies of movies, and even Netflix is separating off its DVD business and applying its golden brand name to its business based on cloud streaming of videos (BTW, Netflix uses Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) for its own business).

Trends are unmistakably toward more and more use of cloud storage. As technologies like Whitewater address the difficulties and/or concerns about using the cloud, this trend can only accelerate. Will tape and disk disappear? No. But if a TSM user can drop a small box in their datacenter and essentially get access to fast, secure, infinitely scalable storage, the rules of the game have undoubtedly changed and cloud storage will command a big seat at the data protection table.  

IBM TSM Users Get Fast Track to the Cloud

IBM recently highlighted new options for data protection using Tivoli Storage Manager in a company Flash video about the benefits of cloud storage. 

The video describes how to think through a cloud strategy and how Riverbed's Whitewater cloud storage gateway enables TSM users to replace tape and disk backup with cloud storage at significant cost and management savings, all without any changes to their TSM environment.  Whitewater maximizes data transfer performance and secures data both locally and in the cloud while minimizing capacity requirements with deduplication and compression.  Essentially, Whitewater looks and acts like you have the cloud as a backup disk target right in your datacenter.

If you are one of the many TSM users that are tired of struggling with cumbersome tape or expensive disk backup systems, take a look at the video and see if Whitewater and the cloud can help address your data protection headaches.

Riverbed's Optimization Solutions for the Cloud

Recently I saw a blog post on ReadWriteWeb / Cloud by David Strom where he described the roles that WAN Optimization can play in helping accelerate Cloud-based IT services.

This has long been an area of attention at Riverbed; for years now we have been helping Enterprises address and solve the challenges they've faced with business applications performing poorly across their private WANs. Riverbed's award-winning Steelhead family of WAN Optimization appliances have held a leading position in the global market for the last several years, according to several leading industry analyst firms.

Now, in the era of Cloud-based IT services, the performance problems created by the increased distance between users and their data, combined with the lack of QoS and un-guaranteed internet performance are significantly worse than those faced within a structured and well-known corporate IT environment. Thus the need for performance optimization in these cloud environments is even greater than in traditional, private corporate IT.

These requirements have prompted Riverbed to develop and offer a whole range of products and technologies, to address the vast majority of Cloud-based IT applications and environments. In his recent blog post,  David mentioned only one Riverbed product in this context, the Steelhead Appliance.  

In addition to this though Riverbed also has the following products available to address the Acceleration & Optimization needs of virtual and cloud environments :

1. Virtual Steelhead - as the name suggests, a virtual version of the Steelhead product that can be run on VMWare ESX/ESXi platforms
2. Cloud Steelhead - Steelhead WAN Optimization + simple portal-based management, On-demand instantiation, easy cloning, fliexible sizing and pricing
3. Riverbed Whitewater - a single-ended Cloud Storage Gateway that delivers speed, security, cost-efficiency and ease of use for Cloud-based storage services and of course
4. Steelhead Mobile - PC and MAC client acceleration software, so you can enjoy accelerated cloud IT services from anywhere, over any connectivity medium.

Additionally with the recent acquisition of both Zeus and Aptimize, Riverbed now also has two new Single-Ended technologies - Application Delivery Controller and Web Content Optimization - to help accelerate  both public and private cloud-based web content and applications.

So in summary, Riverbed really should be your first port of call for any cloud IT service acceleration & optimization requirements.

Meet Riverbed at EMC Americas Forum 2011 - Performance Data Protection for the Cloud

Riverbed and EMC are coming to a city near you! Starting today, in Chicago, you can meet with WAN optimization and data protection experts from Riverbed at EMC Forum events, and learn how to effectively and efficiently protect your data in private, public and hybrid clouds environments. At these day-long events, you will experience keynotes, breakouts and exhibits – all focused on addressing performance for managing your data in the cloud. Riverbed executives will discuss how WAN optimization plays a critical role in a data backup cloud infrastructure, off-site data security, lowered data protection costs, optimized storage utilization and lowered TCO from automation, as well as demonstrate integrated Riverbed and EMC solutions for data protection and backup to the cloud. 

Join Riverbed at the following EMC Forum events:

• Chicago, IL – July 19
• Long Beach, CA – August 10
• Mexico City, Mexico – August 24
• New York City, N.Y. – October 6
• Boston, MA – October 20
• Toronto, Canada – November 3
• Dallas, TX – November 15

For additional information on the EMC Forum events, including event locations and registration, visit http://www.emc.com/campaign/global/forum2011/.

Also, learn more about how Riverbed and EMC work together — for your data protection needs — at http://www.riverbed.com/emc/.

Three Key Considerations for Cloud Storage Gateways

Eric Thacker, Riverbed's Director of Product Marketing for Whitewater, published an article last week at CTOEdge, where he discusses Three Key Considerations for Cloud Storage Gateways.  We'll give you the three considerations here, but if you want some elaboration, you're going to need to click on the link to the actual article.

According to Eric, the three key considerations are:

1. Enabling performance optimization
2. Reducing risk with end-to-end security
3. Eliminating vendor lock-in.

Now that you're hooked, time to go and read Eric's article.  You know you want to.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - Happy Birthday United States of America

The 4^th of July, The Glorious Fourth,  Independence Day or the birthday of the United States of America  are all names that are used to recognize the day the declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress. This day marked the legal separation of the 13 colonies from Great Britain and opened new opportunities for the people of the United States to have certain unalienable rights.

 Second sentence from the Declaration of Independence states “ We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that amongst these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

 Much like the 13 colonies that declared their independence in July 4, 1776, knowledge workers should also have unalienable rights including the liberty to access data anywhere, any time without having to deal with bandwidth and latency issues which we would all agree, if not addressed, would dampen our pursuit of happiness!

 So in tribute to the 4^th let me suggest 4 ways to gain independence and performance happiness.

 1.       Know your applications and make sure to choose a WAN optimization vendor that can give you application specific acceleration.  Riverbed prides ourselves in supporting the broadest range of layer-7 application-specific optimizations of any WAN optimization vendor.  Chances are that we can improve the performance of the applications you are running

2.       Make sure that your choice supports all environments - data center, branch office, mobile workers, VDI, private cloud, public cloud, etc.  Riverbed offers WAN optimization technology that delivers best-of-breed performance for all environments eliminating the need to have different vendor interfaces, integration, and performance standards.

3.       Know where your performance issues are and have the right tools to quickly drill down to the root cause.  Riverbed’s application-aware Network Performance Management (NPM) integrated architecture gives customers robust real-time network and application performance analytics, resulting in complete top-down visibility into their network and applications. Cascade is the only NPM solution on the market that fully consolidates real-time business-level performance views with packet-level analysis all in a single data set that users can seamlessly navigate in order to quickly and accurately diagnose and troubleshoot network and application performance problems.

4.       Chose a vendor that has industry leading support. In April of this year Riverbed was recognized and certified by J.D. Power and Associates and TSIA for excellence in Global Customer Service and Support. These certifications acknowledge excellence in delivering outstanding service and support on a worldwide basis to Riverbed customers. Riverbed is one of a select few companies to receive this distinction for global certification under both the J.D. Power and Associates CTSS and the TSIA Excellence in Service Operations program in the same year.

 Typical 4^th of July tradition is to celebrate by hosting a barbeque, watching fireworks or by decorating in the colors of the American flag – red, white, and blue. For our Riverbed customer’s we encourage you to celebrate your performance independence by celebrating in the spirit of the 4^th.

 So whether you enjoy a nice steak and Steelhead, have some Cascade and cocktails, or decide to parade the streets decorated in Riverbed orange, we wish you a very happy Independence day!

The Amazon Web Services Cloud Summit 2011

On Friday, I was one of the Riverbed folks who got to attend the Amazon Web Services Summit 2011 at the New York Hilton in midtown Manhattan. Originally, this event was scheduled to be held at the much smaller Roosevelt Hotel, but when registration outstripped that venue's capacity Amazon moved it to the larger New York Hilton. 

I didn't get an exact count of attendees, but the main presentation room had nearly 1000 chairs set up, and during the middle of the day, the space was pretty much full. 

And the Riverbed booth, one of only a couple of dozen in the Vendor Expo, was very busy.  (Yes, our candy jar helped, but there were a tremendous number of good intelligent conversations...) We had a lot of questions about our Whitewater Cloud Storage Accelerator, and about Cloud Steelhead.  We also had a number of questions from people who were not familiar with what we do at all, and seemed pretty impressed.

There seemed to be general agreement that the cloud has already become incredibly important and useful (though, to be fair, the crowd was self-selecting for that point of view...), but that it can be very slow, especially when sending large files over long distances. 

It really does seem that as much as enterprises need the cloud, the cloud needs Riverbed.

If this event wasn't geographically convenient for you, there are currently two more AWS Cloud Summits scheduled, one for tomorrow in London, and another the following Tuesday in San Francisco.  You can see the agendas here.  (They may be sold out; there will be additional events later.)

New Cloud Storage Gateway Models Introduced

New Cloud Storage Gateway Models Introduced

Today we introduced three new Whitewater cloud storage gateway models that will now allow a wider range of organizations, including small and medium businesses (SMBs), to take advantage of the benefits of cloud data protection. The new Whitewater models 510 and 710 are purpose-built for SMBs, while the Whitewater model 2010 is designed for the mid-sized enterprise and targeted use cases in the large enterprise. 

Here is a link to the press release for more details.

Also, here is a demo of Whitewater in action.

 

It's official - businesses are doing less for disaster recovery

At Riverbed, we spend so much time along with our partners like EMC, NetApp, HP, and others talking about disaster recovery that we assume everyone has heard us by now. I've even had those awkward cocktail party moments where I start rattling off some DR story and someone says, "Yeah, you've told me that one before." Oops.

Thankfully, the folks at Forrester are refilling my cocktail story trough with new data in their report, "State Of Enterprise Disaster Recovery Preparedness, Q2 2011."

I found two trends from this report really interesting:

• Companies are reducing the number of DR sites they manage. It's no surprise that the recession has had something to do with this. And it's not a question of ROI (Companies noted on average $350,000 per hour as the cost of downtime), it's cold hard cash that's driving companies to fewer sites.
• A whopping 65% of enterprises are interested or already implementing some sort of cloud/service based DR strategy. It's driven by the instant-on, elastic capacity nature of cloud and the desire to eliminate management of additional sites.

I think that these dynamics are certainly aligned with what's been driving the interest in DR-oriented performance solutions. Customers are looking to solutions like Steelhead to cut the cost of backing up or replicating data within their private environments; they look to solutions like Whitewater to accelerate and deduplicate cloud storage environments, and finally Cloud Steelhead to accelerate compute and applications in the cloud.

Customers tend to like the idea that Riverbed has a multi-pronged approach to optimizing disaster recovery, as we have to all recognize that priorities change, budgets change, but the need to protect your business doesn't.

I'd be interested in hearing from you - has your business been investing more or less in disaster recovery this year than in the past? And are you considering cloud as a DR strategy?

Riverbed drinks its own wine

Riverbed Backup Administrator Jim Clayton shares how he uses his company's Whitewater product to enable him to do data backup smarter and in a more cost effective manner.

 

Distributed recentralization: Networks to eleven!

It's a sunny Friday morning here in Seattle. (No, really.) On these rare times when prodigious quantities of warmth and light stream through the large south and east windows of my house, it's easy to let the daily fray subside for a bit and reflect on larger trends. Lately, I've noticed some interesting connections between cloud computing and user-centric IT.

A colleague recently spotted a couple articles that piqued my curiosity. In The virtual desktop: Everything old is new again, CRN's Edward Corriea describes how virtualization's initial appearance on mainframes faded away like an old pair of jeans, only to come back in fashion later: first on commodity x86 hardware and then as one of the core components of cloud computing. Next up is desktop virtualization, or VDI. Edward cites VDI's intense I/O requirements as one of the main shortfalls of large-scale VDI deployments. So many virtual clients, each performing profligate I/O itself, create a "VM I/O blender" on the physical hardware: constant random I/O kills disk performance.

In InformationWeek's 2011 End-user Device Survey, Jonathan Feldman chronicles the ongoing consumerization of corporate IT. Provocatively, he wonders whether it makes sense to hang on to the traditional corporate desktop. Android tablets and VDI are both making gains, he writes; yet fat desktops trapped in three-year replacement cycles and tied to expensive PC leases remain prevalent. Not everything is so gloomy, though. SaaS subscriptions are way up and for some organizations speed now trumps features: he's seeing tradeoff of screen size for portability. Jonathan's data show that organizations are now readying for true VDI, too. He goes on to describe how to free up IT funds to support comprehensive mobile device management, including the burgeoning BYOD ("bring your own device") movement. Jonathan concludes with sage advice: "The end user device paradigm shift offers significant opportunities for business technology innovation, but you'll miss out if you're purely focusing on span of control and defensive IT."

Reading these articles reminded me about a presentation on virtualization security I delivered at Microsoft TechEd a few years ago. I began that talk, as I frequently do, with a short retrospective. The "operating system" running on that hulking PC you bought in the late 1980s didn't have a whole lot to worry about: how much damage can one user running one application really cause? Eventually the operating system had to mature: first to enforce application boundaries so that multitasking would work, then to enforce user boundaries so that multiple people could share a computer. When hardware became powerful enough, software technology shifted: a hypervisor along with a finely-tuned host OS enforced guest OS boundaries so that multiple environments could share a server. A simple visual progression of these trust boundaries might look like this:

At this point, you might be wondering: "What's this got to do with user-centric IT and, wait, doesn't Riverbed sell network stuff?" Let me link these seemingly disparate elements together.

Virtualization is, of course, one of the fundamental technologies that underlie cloud -- providers can crank resource utilization to 11.  But a funny thing happened along the way to the user-centric IT concert: while the cloud offers seemingly infinite compute and storage, people learned the bandwidth to get there isn't all unicorns and rainbows. That phone or tablet of yours is a full-fledged computer, roomy and always connected. It's likely to be your primary means of accessing (and secondary means of storing) work-related stuff. The trends Edward and Jon highlight -- more VDI, more BYOD, more SaaS, more mobility -- all require network capacities that are expensive to build out and bump into inconvenient laws of physics.

We're entering an era I call distributed recentralization. As I ponder the simultaneous emergence of cloud computing and the move toward IT consumerization, it occurs to me that each one contributes to the sudden and continual growth of the other. We humans are creating and consuming massive amounts of data every day, a lot of it with consumer-type devices. Much of that information gets sent to and redistributed from the cloud. All this activity puts enormous pressures on network links -- pressures that often can't be overcome just by buying a bigger pipe.

We're passionate about WANs at Riverbed. WANs allow people to create, access, store, and compute information wherever it's convenient to do so -- frequently at distance. Our expanding product line enables you to be as creative as you can be without worrying about network or storage constraints. Cloud and consumerization certainly don't imply that IT will become a commodity; indeed, the information an organization possess, and how it manipulates and shares that information, truly are competitive differentiators. Let us help you crank your differentiation to 11.

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.

 

 

What is the real value of my stored documents?

Today's guest blogger is Mark Lewis.  Mark is the Senior Director of Marketing and Alliances for Riverbed in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) for Riverbed.  He is based in London, England.

I was talking with a customer recently about his storage needs, how they had grown over the years and how they were likely to grow in to the future. Truth is, he said, “It’s difficult to know what to keep and what to dispose of, so we keep everything, just in case”!

It reminded me of the ‘man drawer’ sketch by comedian Michael McIntyre. A ‘man drawer’ is the kind of place you store batteries, even old ones you haven’t had a chance to throw away yet. You’ll store instruction manuals for appliances you no longer own, new and old light bulbs, keys from homes you don’t live in any more and, of course the most masculine device key of all, the radiator bleeding key.

 

Why do we keep all this? I have asked this question of many customers and they all agree they know they are keeping more than they need to, but the reasons are very convincing. For some it’s regulatory needs, though they admit not all documents are regulated but it’s ‘too complicated to separate them’. For others the argument of falling disk prices means the cost of storing is always coming down, excluding management of storage of course.

But how are we going to protect all that data? Even with deduplication storage technologies, the rate of growth is going to continue at a tremendous rate and more importantly what happens at the point of recovery? There are going to be a lot of old batteries, bulbs and keys to sift through or rather their business document equivalents.

One assuring bit of news are the new services being launched by various organizations such as Amazon and AT&T with many more to follow, offering backup options in a multi-tenanted environment. Some call this ‘cloud storage’.

The great news is your back up really can be someone else’s problem and with technology from organizations like Riverbed with its Whitewater appliances these third party solutions can seamlessly integrate in to any IT environment. If you want to learn more look out for a number of online seminars and trade shows taking place. Or you can read more about these solutions here

 

International Metaphor Day

Today's guest blogger is Nik Rouda.  Nik is Riverbed's Director of Marketing, Solutions and Verticals, and he writes a pretty nifty blog entry.

Though I frequently get asked, “So, what do you do for a living?” I have a hard time with this question.  I’ve found that a generic brush-off like “I work in IT” never seems to satisfy, only prompting more questions.  A more precise answer generally goes “I do product and solutions marketing on how globally connected enterprises can optimize their wide area networks, gain visibility into … Hey, where are you going?”

What’s a guy to do?  How do I answer this question without getting too nerdy or being too vague?  The best efforts seem to involve metaphors: “I’m like William Shatner in all those Priceline commercials” or “I’m a televangelist,  but I promote go-fast networking gear and I don’t use much hair gel.”  If followed quickly enough with “want another drink?” then the moment passes pretty acceptably.

Now, sometimes I’m actually talking to someone who works in technology, such as a storage administrator.  What metaphors can I use about Riverbed to get a storage guy thinking about the value of Riverbed?

Here are a few favorites:

“Companies trying to replicate all their data between data centers may find it’s like trying to force a cow through a drinking straw: everything isn’t going to fit.  Steelhead appliances greatly reduce the bandwidth requirements, just sending the fresh milk across the WAN since we’ve seen the rest of the cow before.”

“Tiering your storage for DR purposes is like picking which of your possessions to save from a burning house, a really horrible compromise that doesn’t solve the problem.  Riverbed allows you to protect everything at once, so it’s safe in the event of a disaster.”

“Buying more bandwidth to make room for replication is like building a completely new national highway system right next to the one we already have.  It would be extremely difficult to do, insanely expensive, and instantly double the cost of ongoing maintenance.  The real solution is to more efficiently use what you already have, prioritizing and reducing traffic, and minimizing congestion and collisions.”

 “The challenge of backing up data in each branch is like the pain of having to purchase a VCR for every house in America, and making everyone drive to a video store, hoping it’s easy to find the movie they had in mind, and also hoping it doesn’t get lost or damaged in the hot car.  High-speed streaming, on-demand video services like Netflix are the future, reducing cost, hassle, complexity, and risk.  Whitewater is like the Netflix of enterprise cloud backup and archive.”

 So, enough about me, what do you do for a living?  Want another drink?

Taneja Group asks, "Is cloud-enabled DR is ready for prime time?" Riverbed says YES!

(by Steve Riley and Evan Marcus)

Last month, in an article at InfoStor.com, Jeff Byrne and Jeff Boles of The Taneja Group wondered aloud, Is cloud-enabled DR ready for prime time?  Here at Riverbed, we can confidently answer yes, indeed it is.

Implementing processes and technology for disaster recovery is like going to the dentist: no one enjoys it (well, perhaps dentists and this kid do) but if you don’t do it, eventually your organization will be in a world of hurt and you might be out of a job. Jeff and Jeff quote an informal statistic that 25% of their readers have experienced unplanned outages. We hope you’ll never be part of that. If, however, someday happens to you, then with a little planning, your trip to the DR dentist will go much easier.

We agree with the claim that cloud-based DR eliminates much of the pain traditional approaches impose. While the authors correctly state that cloud-based DR is “a recipe matched to SME needs,” large enterprises, too, can derive the same benefits. In their article, Jeff and Jeff enumerate six challenges that cloud-based DR brings. We’ll briefly discuss how Riverbed’s new Whitewater Cloud Storage Accelerator Appliance (or just "Whitewater") addresses each of them.

1. Ease of Use: One of the biggest challenges that IT organizations face as they migrate DR to the cloud is that they have to change their infrastructure. They need backup utilities that speak cloud protocols. And then they still have to maintain the old stuff so that they can recover data from the existing DR infrastructure. With Whitewater you don’t have to change your existing backup product at all. You just point your current backup tool at the Whitewater’s NFS or CIFS front-end, and send the backups there just as you always have. 100% compatibility. No need to change technologies. What could be easier?
2. Security: Whitewater protects your data in transit with SSL and in storage (local and cloud) with 256-bit AES encryption. The data is never stored or transported in cleartext after it leaves its original location. The encryption key is stored in the Whitewater appliance and if something happens to the appliance, you just need to enter the key into a new appliance. And only you have the key. Not Riverbed and not the cloud provider.
3. Access: Whitewater does something very unusual in the way it handles data that has passed through it into the cloud. It keeps a local copy of the data (encrypted, of course) so that the data can be accessed locally without touching the remote cloud. The result is dramatic improvements in speed and performance when restoring cloud-based backup data. Whitewater also uses the local data store to deduplicate data that’s going out onto the cloud, reducing your cloud costs.
4. Recovery Time: Since a copy of the most recently backed up data is stored locally within Whitewater, there’s no need to perform most data restores across the cloud. When data does need to be pulled in from across the cloud, it is pulled into Whitewater deduplicated, vastly reducing the time and amount of data that must be moved. The data is reconstituted inside Whitewater and returned to the requesting application in its original form. Apart from the decrease in recovery time, users can’t tell that anything has happened to their data.
5. Recovery Effort: Administrators don’t need to change the tools that they use to recover data through a Whitewater appliance. They can use the same backup and restore utilities that they use today. The Whitewater appliance will translate between the backup protocol and the cloud protocol and retrieve the backed up data with no changes to procedures and no learning curve.
6. Provider Lock-In: Whitewater supports two cloud storage APIs today: Amazon S3 and EMC Atmos. You can easily move from one cloud to another simply by changing Whitewater’s destination.

When evaluating cloud-based DR, a question equally important to “how do I get my stuff backed up?” is “how do I get my stuff back after an outage?” This is where Whitewater really shines because of the constant movement and near-instant recovery capabilities of the cloud-via-DR-gateway architecture. How so? The authors allude to it at the end of their article:

Emerging cloud gateway vendors, when enabled by primary storage support and the ability to serve up storage from a virtual appliance, can in effect pre-stage data automatically and make it available to virtual servers in the cloud. Not all cloud gateway solutions can do this, but when they can they will further simplify the recovery process.

Whitewater can do this today. Let’s walk through a hypothetical.

Six months ago you deployed a Whitewater appliance on your network, pointed it to an Amazon S3 bucket, and retargeted your backup software to the appliance. All of your data is securely backed up offsite. Now the Bad Day happens: your phone rings incessantly, bloggers are griping about you, people paid more than you are mobbing your office. Now what? Well, since your data is already in Amazon Web Services, perhaps the AWS cloud can become your temporary data center? With Whitewater Virtual Edition you can start a compute instance that runs a virtualized appliance, import your encryption key, and obtain access to your data. Then you can start some application compute instances, extract your backed up data into live disk volumes, remap your DNS entries, and get back online.

No, it isn’t exactly point-and-click, at least not yet. But with some planning—mostly defining your compute instance types, understanding scale-out requirements, and testing application behavior—you can bring mission critical (read: revenue generating) applications into service in a matter of a few hours. With that out of the way, then, you can begin work on returning to normal.

There…that wasn’t so bad now, was it? Polish your smile—learn more about Riverbed’s cloud-based disaster recovery solutions today.