Riverbed extends Whitewater archiving to support HP, Microsoft and Oracle systems

Riverbed Technology has added a number of platforms and services to its Whitewater storage and archiving platform to cover storage systems from HP, Commvault, Microsoft, Oracle and Veeam.

Whitewater devices will also be able to link with cloud archiving services from Open Stack, Rackspace and Windows Azure.

Designed to replace tape storage, Whitewater acts as a link between on-premise storage servers and cloud archiving services. The network appliance compresses, deduplicates and encrypts data, which is then transferred to cloud storage services.

Ray Villaneuve, general manager for Riverbed Whitewater, said that Whitewater now supports 87 per cent of enterprise storage and archiving platforms.

"We have pretty much got the universe covered on the front ends, and on the back end you will see a lot of expansion," he told V3.

Early studies suggest that Whitewater offers substantial cost and simplicity benefits over current tape archiving and storage services, according to Villaneuve. Customers have in some cases seen reductions in storage costs of as much as 50 per cent and as savings as high as $80,000 annually, he said.

Riverbed believes that Whitewater will succeed despite slower overall adoption of cloud storage platforms. Villaneuve said that customers are less concern about performance issues, because backup and archiving require comparatively slower operating speeds than other storage tasks.

"This is a market that is in a rather early stage of evolution, and customers are viewing the backup use case as a classic opportunity for the cloud," he said.

"It tends to not be performance sensitive, whereas cloud storage for a tier-two or tier-three application requires a level of performance that customers are not ready to take a risk on."