Clouds Roll in on Riverbed’s Two New Offerings
Counting on the impending ubiquity of cloud computing and hoping to make its mark as an innovator in the space, Riverbed has developed two products it hopes will make life easier for IT administrators going ethereal.
Riverbed Cloud Steelhead is a software-based application that sits in the cloud provider’s data center to accelerate the movement of data, reducing the time it takes to migrate data to and from the public cloud. While there are certainly similar offerings on the market, Eric Wolford, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Riverbed, said the Cloud Steelhead offering makes it own mark through simplicity and ease of use.
“First off, it’s a portal-based offering, and it’s intuitive. With a few clicks of the mouse, a customer can set up the Cloud Steelhead and start seeing the efficiency gains almost immediately,” he said.
The software also features seamless cloud integration, enabling Cloud Steelhead to automatically discover and establish connections to cloud environments through a discovery agent built in to the software. Plus, IT departments can use their existing Cloud Steelhead settings and configurations to bring new Cloud Steelhead instances online quickly and easily.
Riverbed also announced Whitewater, an appliance-based storage accelerator that helps speed backup and recovery time in the cloud exponentially. Whitewater sits at the customer premise – as either a physical or virtual applicance – and in tests reduced an average 9-hour backup to 10 minutes, Wolford said.
“All of a sudden the value proposition becomes much more apparent,” he said.
Whitewater also is uber-secure, encrypting data while it’s in transit while storing the encryption key at the customer end. Whitewater integrates seamlessly with existing backup software, ensuring that enterprises can utilize cloud storage without any changes to their already-established software and processes.
As more companies consider the cloud as a viable alternative to on-premise computing, more IT vendors are developing downright useful technologies to enable deployment and use of the cloud. Resellers who understand the value of innovation of this new generation of technologies will be the real winners in the race to the cloud.
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