Riverbed Tailors WAFS to Disaster Recovery

Riverbed Tailors WAFS to Disaster Recovery

By Greg McNevin

October 24, 2007: Riverbed has adding some potent new capabilities to its Steelhead wide area file services (WAFS) device this week, claiming better performance during disaster recovery, new encryption functionality, support for Oracle 11i applications and a whole new appliance.

The software upgrade (version 4.1 of the Riverbed Optimisation System or RiOS) has brought in a new feature called Disaster Recovery Mode which detects big changes in data replication, such as the changes that occur during disaster prep or recovery, and adjusts its optimisation methods accordingly.

The company claims that RiOS 4.1 now combines advanced optimisation with a new set of behavioural traffic recognition features to enable “adaptive acceleration based on the size and type of the data to be transferred.”

The company is holding its cards close to its chest on how the software works, but according to searchstorage.com, one main change is how the software writes data to disk. It apparently creates large contiguous writes instead of random smaller chunks. “It's similar to changing from handing you a deck of cards one at a time to handing you the whole deck at once,” Riverbed's senior product marketing manager, Harold Byun told the publication.

Next to the software updates, the company has also introduced model 6120 of its Steelhead appliances, which it says is optimised for disaster recovery. Riverbed says the 6120 specialises in data-center-to-data-center transfers, while retaining the capability to support acceleration for branch offices and mobile workers. The appliance has a raw capacity of seven terabytes and a data store that is over three terabytes in size – essentially doubling the capacity of the firms largest current model.

“With the combination of the new disaster recovery functionality in RiOS 4.1 and the processing and storage capacity of the Steelhead appliance model 6120, we are able to deliver increased scalability for disaster recovery operations,” claims Eric Wolford, senior vice president, marketing and business development at Riverbed. “When the data fire hose is turned on, RiOS 4.1 and the Steelhead appliance model 6120 working together are able to absorb the load, identify the traffic type and accelerate its transfer over the WAN–without becoming a bottleneck.”

Wolford adds that participants in its beta program have seen significant disaster recovery performance improvements, and claims that one company replicating 3 terabytes over a 20 MB circuit every day between regional hubs was able to improve its replication time by 10X when faced with regular 24 hour transfers.

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