News
Riverbed Boosts Its Storage Solution for AWS
Riverbed Technology, which specializes in solutions that improve application and network performance, made several announcements recently aimed at storage, backup and recovery services for Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS).
Late last month, the company launched a version of its SteelStore cloud storage solution that runs natively in AWS. SteelStore for AWS works with users' existing backup solutions and allows them to backup and recover AWS workloads to and from secondary cloud locations.
"By using SteelStore physical or virtual appliances on-premises, data is seamlessly and securely protected in the cloud," according to Riverbed's announcement. "If the primary site is unavailable, organizations can quickly spin up SteelStore and recover data to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)."
The aim of SteelStore for AWS is to enable organizations to take advantage of cloud-to-cloud resiliency, which is the practice of shifting production workloads from one cloud to another while maintaining high availability.
"If you're looking to protect a critical workload in the cloud, it makes the most sense to protect it within the cloud, as well, rather than bring it back on-premises," explained Riverbed Product Marketing Manager Rachel Dines in a blog post. "This could be protecting it within the same cloud provider, but separating copies by region, log-in credentials [and so on]. Or, it could mean protecting data across multiple clouds."
There are three versions of SteelStore for AWS available in the AWS Marketplace. They offer 4TB, 8TB or 16TB of usable cache and 1.2PB, 2.5PB or 5PB of logical managed storage.
More recently, Riverbed announced an offer that would give AWS customers free access to the virtual edition of SteelStore. The offer, which kicked off last week, would let qualifying applicants use the Riverbed virtual SteelStore 8TB solution at no cost for six months, giving them up to 48TB of Amazon S3 storage. It's designed to "help qualified enterprise, midmarket, and [small to midsize business] customers in North America to kick-start their cloud-storage projects," according to a blog post by AWS evangelist Jeff Barr.
The offer is available only for a limited time -- between Sept. 9 and Oct. 9 -- and not all who sign up in that period will qualify, according to Riverbed.