Real dedupe/cost savings results from a Riverbed WhiteWater

by jk-47 on October 15, 2012 in Misc, Riverbed, Words of Wisdom

***** Update 11/3/2014 — Netapp bought the rights to WhiteWater, which is now called “SteelStore” and I am sure Netapp will rename it something like ~~OnCommandOnTapCloudStore or something like that~~ AltaVault. I am VERY happy with the announcement. I can just imagine the super awesomeness of being able to click a volume in a NAS share and have it replicate to S3, OpenStack Storage, or Glacier! ******

Hey all,

I just wanted to share a cool bit of information about what one of our Riverbed Whitewater 710 customers is getting as backup to disk and automatic redundancy to “the cloud”. This customer is using Backup Exec 2012, with the Whitewater appliance as a backup datastore, running nightly incrementals and weekly fulls of their entire VMware environment, and individual agent backups of databases.

If you have never heard of Riverbed’s Whitewater appliance & virtual appliance before, here is what Riverbed says about it: “Riverbed^® Whitewater^® cloud storage gateways modernize data protection and streamline operations for organizations of all sizes from enterprises to small remote offices. Leveraging industry-leading technologies, Whitewater appliances deliver local-like performance while using private or public cloud for secure off-site storage. ”

Yeah that’s alot of buzzwords, but to sum it up: It’s CIFS & NFS mount points that you can save stuff to, and it’ll dedupe, compress, and upload it to a cloud services provider (OpenStack such as my company’s cloud solution, Amazon S3, and others) It’s pretty sweet. Plus, let’s say your place burns down, your data is still deduped, encrypted, and in the cloud, and you can bring up a virtual appliance anywhere and get to it again.

Take a look at the Storage Optimization screenshot from last week from the appliance. Imagine, fitting 66.7 TB of stored data from backups in 4TB of physical and cloud space!

Thinking in terms of what is actually saved, not only are you transferring less over the wan to the cloud, but your month on month savings increases as you use the unit more and more.

Since this appliance uses many vendors cloud services offerings, from Amazon S3 and soon my company’s cloud offering will be fully OpenStack compatible. Take a look at what this customer would be paying with Amazon S3 with and without the unit.

Cloud storage (Amazon S3) MONTHLY Pricing for stored data:

Without Whitewater: 66.7TB and 1000GB/mo transfer:  $7271!
With Whitewater :      4TB and 100GB/mo throughput: $465

1 2	Without Whitewater: 66.7TB and 1000GB/mo transfer: $7271! With Whitewater : 4TB and 100GB/mo throughput: $465

Currently they see $6806 Savings per month without the appliance and having the data “In the cloud!” ** Savings will even become much better with the amount of data stored in the Whitewater.

This customer will see a return on investment early in the first year as opposed to the same solution without Whitewater! Imagine how much the customer would end up savings with the illustrated data growth after years 2 and 3!

This customer is embracing the cloud in a big way, which is allowing them to close DR data centers & recovery sites, be more highly available, and easily have geographically disperse backups and recovery.

Expect an official white paper on the success this customer is having. I was the designer of choice for this company’s entire cloud-based disaster recovery solution, and my employer is their vendor of choice when it comes to purchasing Riverbed, NetApp storage hardware, Virtualization software, Cisco Network equipment, and designing & implementing their IT solutions!

I have to say, my job is pretty fun sometimes! I will be doing some in depth coverage of some Riverbed products soon, since I have been playing with it a ton at customer sites lately, and it deserves some credit on the blog.

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