Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the leader in application performance infrastructure, today announced Wright-Pierce is using Riverbed® SteelStoreTM(formerly Riverbed Whitewater) to reduce the cost of storing large volumes of data, to streamline backup and to accelerate recovery. For Wright-Pierce, the combination of the SteelStorecloud storage gateway appliance with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a much better approach to storing its ever-increasing amount of CAD, GIS and other engineering data compared to previous on-premises tape and disk-to-disk systems. Using SteelStore, Write-Pierce can take advantage of the cloud price wars and now pays just hundreds of dollars per month to store 10 terabytes of data.
Wright-Pierce is an award-winning engineering firm specializing in water, wastewater and infrastructure services for public and private clients. The firm is employee-owned with 200 engineers and support professionals located in seven offices. Wright-Pierce has been actively growing its business beyond the Company’s Maine headquarters southward to service the entire Northeast, increasing the amount of data that must be backed up and stored. Initially, the firm moved from tape backup to a disk-to-disk approach, but it was hard to control costs as the system had to keep expanding to handle growing amounts of data.
Ray Sirois, director of IT at Wright-Pierce, realized that cloud data storage offered a less expensive and elastic alternative to tape and disk-to-disk backup. As a long-time Riverbed customer, with Riverbed SteelHeadÒ appliances playing a key role in its expansion, Sirois was aware of the value Riverbed SteelStoretechnology could add to a cloud storage strategy: immediate data recovery for backup and archiving applications; data encryption in flight to the cloud and at rest with SSL v3; and 256-bit AES encryption and deduplication functionality to moderate the cost of cloud storage by shrinking the amount of data sent there. With a transition to SteelStore and cloud data storage (in Amazon S3), the firm would deal with less backup hardware and be able to ensure a higher level of data security.
“We have a long history with Riverbed, and we’re very happy with Riverbed,” said Sirois. “Riverbed provides enabling technologies for us and has been a big part of our success over the last 10 years. Now, we have one small device in the rack compared to the four disk-to-disk devices we had before, and we’ve eliminated the need to add more. Storing data in the cloud means we don’t have to buy expensive equipment to keep up with our company’s growth, but we also don’t have to worry about buying too little and then having to go back and asking for money again. Another benefit of storing data in the cloud is a higher level of security than what you can provide at your own facilities.”
Wright-Pierce is benefitting from Amazon’s recent price reduction (from 7.5 cents/gigabyte/month to 3 cents/gigabyte/month) to store 10 terabytes of data. No longer maintaining the tape and disk-to-disk backup systems is saving the company money, as is the fact that they can now retire a network attached storage (NAS) device and use some terabytes on the SteelStore appliance to house project archives. The SteelStore appliance consumes 80% less power than the four disk-to-disk devices. And, because it requires less rack space, the cooling requirement is lower as well.
Riverbed SteelStore and Riverbed Application Performance Platform
The industry’s most scalable cloud storage appliance reduces data protection and storage costs by up to 80%, provides immediate data access and seamlessly integrates into existing infrastructures. With built-in replication capabilities, SteelStore provides instant data access at a second location while leveraging the industry’s most cost-effective cloud storage. By deploying SteelStore as part of your data protection or archiving strategy, IT teams eliminate the headaches of tape-based systems, improve disaster recovery (DR) readiness, and seamlessly integrate the cloud’s high data durability and declining pricing into their infrastructure to deliver increased flexibility and ROI within months. Named “Product of the Year” by Storage Magazine-SearchStorage.com in the category for backup hardware.
Riverbed SteelStore is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform™, the most complete platform to enable organizations to embrace location-independent computing, so that business objectives – not technical constraints – drive how applications and data are delivered. The Riverbed Application Performance Platform gives companies the flexibility to host applications and data in the locations that best serve the business while ensuring the flawless delivery of those apps to better leverage global resources, radically reduce the cost of running their business, and maximize employee productivity.