Riverbed Teams with Nirvanix to Help Companies Shift to the Cloud, Cut the Fat out of IT

Whitewater storage acceleration appliance coupled with Nirvanix Public, Private, and Hybrid Cloud Storage Solutions provides unique business benefits

By James E. Bagley
Senior analyst
Deni Connor
Founding analyst
Storage Strategies NOW
April 2011

Riverbed’s Whitewater appliances provide enterprises with many choices when it comes to cloud storage providers. The recent addition of the Nirvanix CloudComplete portfolio of public, private and hybrid cloud solutions provides turnkey access to cloud storage that was purpose-built for enterprise requirements. Nirvanix operates seven globally positioned data centers that are accessed as a single namespace, meaning that no matter where you upload or download a file from, it always appears as the same file. When you upload a file, even before it’s replicated to other nodes, it’s immediately available by redirecting the user to the node where the file exists. If a file exists in three nodes but is only updated in one node, Nirvanix software will update the file across all three nodes automatically, ensuring that only the most current content is accessed.

With features for data security and storage elasticity built into each storage node, a Whitewater appliance customer can simply target the appliance as a backup device and everything else is automatic. All of Riverbed’s features like in-flight encryption and byte-level deduplication provide a unique value proposition as the amount of time communicating with the cloud and the amount of data stored are reduced by average factors of 10 to 30 to one. Similarly, when data needs to be restored or recovered, the appliance speeds the process by the same factors when compared to simple web access or virtual private networks. As customers require a data mover for all types of clouds, Riverbed’s Whitewater appliance can effectively be used with Private, Hybrid and Public iterations of Nirvanix cloud storage.

Why is cloud storage usage growing so fast?
Organizations of all sizes are taking advantage of the cloud for many business-critical applications. In a recent end-user survey conducted by Storage Strategies NOW, 75% of responding CIO/CTO’s are implementing cloud storage. Not surprisingly, e-mail and data protection rank first and second by both CIO/CTO and overall IT staff. With overwhelming data growth driving huge data center and storage system investments, the pay-as-you-go model provided by the public cloud, in particular, is a powerful alternative to the capital expenditures associated with expanding data centers. Reducing storage expense and increasing business agility rank highest in reasons for deploying to the cloud. The biggest concerns remain the relative nascent aspect of public cloud as well as worries about vendor lock-in and data security control. The use of the Riverbed Whitewater appliance will address the latter two, with wide support for both public and private cloud vendors and an excellent reputation for security, reliability and support.

Are all public clouds created equal?
While all public clouds are accessed via the web, they vary dramatically in infrastructure, applications program interface, scope of operations and functionality. The best known vendor is Amazon, with its S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Platform) services. Amazon provides a ‘bare-bones’ functionality that was really built for developers by developers. It is easy to deploy hundreds or thousands of virtual machine  instances and run a massive amount of data through them in order to shake down a new release to an enterprise application system. Nirvanix, on the other hand, has developed a rich feature set embedded in its architecture developed over many years with the enterprise storage user in mind. Its focus on reliability and rapid low cost expandability, high bandwidth, strategic global facilities and quality of service policy direction allows a low cost per GB without charging hidden fees for data access and movement. For this very reason, some of the world’s largest video content providers, software manufacturers, technology manufacturers and financial institutions rely on Nirvanix.

The Riverbed Whitewater Appliance
By implementing its WAN acceleration technology with the Nirvanix feature-rich REST application programming interface, enterprises can implement cloud storage as simply as pointing a backup server to the Whitewater device as regular, local storage. Whitewater is available in three versions, a virtual machine for customers who want to provision their own hardware and two purpose-built hardware appliances with 7TB and 11TB of raw, RAID6-protected capacity. Both hardware models are capable of operating at a blistering rate of one TB per hour.

The following diagram shows a typical Whitewater – Nirvanix deployment:

SSG-NOW Assessment
A combination of two of the best-in-breed vendors in the cloud storage field creates a compelling value proposition for organizations of all sizes. The flexibility of the Whitewater configurations from a light-weight virtual machine to screaming purpose-built hardware models provides an architecture that fits medium enterprises, remote offices and global organizations. Addressing security, vendor lock-in and minimizing data center cost escalation, the Riverbed-Nirvanix partnership will accelerate enterprise cloud storage adoption.

Note: The information and recommendations made by Storage Strategies NOW are based upon public information and sources and may also include personal opinions both of Storage Strategies NOW and others, all of which we believe to be accurate and reliable. As market conditions change however, and not within our control, the information and recommendations are made without warranty of any kind. All product names used and mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. Storage Strategies NOW, Inc. assumes no responsibility or liability for any damages whatsoever (including incidental, consequential or otherwise), caused by your use of, or reliance upon, the information and recommendations presented herein, nor for any inadvertent  Nerrors which may appear in this document.