Data Protection & Disaster Recovery

Business Overview:

IT industry trends such as consolidation and virtualization are driving change in DR. The challenge here is that as customer’s data and systems become concentrated into a few central data centers, a disaster hitting one of those facilities will have a much wider impact across their enterprise. Customers need to think beyond just local backup and high availability into large-scale disaster recovery strategy.

Riverbed concept

Customers can overcome physical and historical constraints to realize the full opportunities in re-organizing their data protection and disaster recovery strategies. By leveraging their WAN for high performance backup and replication, or simply and efficiently utilize cloud storage as a backup or archive target, customers can transform their network from a barrier to an enabler in transporting data securely to multiple offsite locations, including cloud services. Customers can seamlessly integrate Riverbed solutions into their existing infrastructure to maximize their DR capabilities and reduce costs, delivering huge improvements to their RPO and RTO and storage operations.

Technical Overview:

Streamlined Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery
By eliminating the performance bottlenecks inherent in their wide area networks (high latency, limited bandwidth, congestion and/or packet loss), Riverbed technologies enables customers to re-think and streamline their BC/DR strategies.

Data center consolidation, centralized backups, data center to data center replication, and cloud-based data protection all become possible. These streamlined approaches to BC/DR reduce their risk and lower the costs associated implementing, maintaining and scaling the solution over time.

Riverbed technologies remove these performance bottlenecks inherent in their WAN, allowing customers to meet or beat RPO/RTO objectives, all while minimizing recurring costs for WAN infrastructure .

Network-Based Backup and Data Replication:

Wide area network (WAN)-based approaches to data backup are dramatically influenced by WAN bandwidth limitations and network latency. Without significant costly WAN bandwidth upgrades, this can make WAN-based backup impossible for large remote offices with significant data stores.

By overcoming bandwidth limitations and optimizing transfers to overcome network latency, Riverbed SteelHead appliances have successfully enabled and facilitated network-based backup approaches in the most demanding customer environments. Riverbed technology dramatically optimizes large-scale data backups within distributed enterprises by employing:

• Centralized backup and recovery of servers and desktop machines in remote offices
• Replication of centralized data repositories between data centers
• Backup of files and data to cloud services

Riverbed SteelHead appliance deployment for backup and replication

Riverbed SteelHead appliance technology can dramatically accelerate backup and replication in the branch
office and cloud service. At the same time, it can cut bandwidth utilization by up to 95 percent.

Centralized Backup and Recovery

To meet the demands of the global marketplace, enterprises must support employees and computer resources that are distributed throughout the world. When critical data is no longer hosted at just one physical location, the challenge of backing up and securing data is magnified. Traditional approaches involve deploying tape backup equipment and processes to each location that hosts data, and hiring or contracting local resources to manage these resources. This can be a tenuous proposition at best, while for some enterprises it's a completely unrealistic option.

Riverbed makes network-based backup feasible, in many cases through use of existing WAN links, without the need for bandwidth upgrades. Network-based backup allows for host- or array-based backup programs that transfer data into the data center, private or public cloud, where it can be placed onto tape or other secondary storage media. Backup data is then more secure and accessible in the event of a restoration event. Riverbed optimizes the regular transfer of backup data over the WAN into the data center, and accelerates commercial backup software packages by eliminating the transfer of redundant data and minimizing the effects of latency on data transfer. Riverbed's approach eliminates data redundancy across applications or servers as well, going well beyond other data reduction mechanisms found in other storage replication products. This reduces backup windows by up to 90 percent and eliminates up to 95 percent of data that typically has to be copied across the WAN.

Replication of Centralized Data Repositories – in the Private or Public Cloud

An effective disaster recovery (DR) strategy requires that all data be stored redundantly at multiple physical locations. In the event of a disaster that destroys data stored at one location, there will always be a second, redundant copy of the lost data at a different physical location. Such a strategy ensures that a single cataclysmic event, such as hurricane, flood, or terrorist act, will never destroy all the data that a corporation has.

Implementation of an effective DR strategy requires a data replication solution capable of transporting large amounts of data over the long distances required for geographical diversity in the data storage sites. Riverbed speeds data replication solutions to transfer significant amounts of data over the WAN to the DR site. That site can be a regional office, another data center, or even a public cloud service being used as a backup data center. Riverbed supports software server-based data replication solutions, as well as those using fiber channel SANs with FCIP or iFCP.

The Riverbed Solution

Riverbed accelerates data transfer over the WAN, allowing backup and replication to be 5 times, 50 times, or even 100 times faster. Through its revolutionary WAN optimization technology, Riverbed delivers the following capabilities:

• Enables centralized, disk-to-disk backup strategies that simplify remote office backup and data center replication
• Reduces backup windows and transfer times to maximize application availability
• Effectively increases WAN capacity by detecting and avoiding the transfer of repetitive data patterns over the WAN
• Boosts performance to fully-utilize high-speed WAN links

Riverbed's data streamlining typically yields data reduction ratios of 5:1 or greater for the common enterprise workloads seen in SRDF environments. The scalable data reduction (SDR) operation can be performed interchangeably on the SteelHead appliance, either on disk (as SDR – for more matches and greater data reduction), in memory (as SDR-M – for faster throughput), adaptively in either location, or both (as SDR-A) for the best fit of each particular connection's data and overall workload. This functionality dynamically and granularly maximizes the efficient utilization of available resources such as CPU, disk, and memory.

Riverbed has intelligent storage-specific optimizations that yield higher data reduction ratios for the common enterprise workloads seen in SRDF/A environments at both the network and application level, enabling enterprises to realize up to a 30:1 compression while maintaining a high throughput. The optimizations include

• SRDF/A Optimizations – Riverbed customers that use EMC's Symmetrix V-MAX and DMX will benefit from improved data reduction and throughput due to the enhanced SRDF/A optimizations in RiOS 6.1.
• FCIP Optimizations – RiOS 6.1 provides both network- and application-based optimizations for FCIP traffic over MDS gateways. These enhancements speed FCIP traffic to and across the network on both protocol and network levels.

In addition to reducing WAN utilization, the SteelHead appliance includes extensive hierarchical quality of service (QoS) capabilities to ensure that SRDF/A traffic receives the appropriate guaranteed level of WAN bandwidth and latency. This provides SRDF traffic with priority access to the network infrastructure required to ensure consistent performance and maintain RPO/RTO targets.

Riverbed optimizes data transfers over any backup product used to perform the data replication, providing unlimited ease and flexibility for enterprises. In fact, we've partnered with many of the most popular storage and backup software providers to ensure our products interoperate as effectively as possible.

Partner Solutions:

Riverbed Technology works with strategic technology and service provider partners to deliver best-of-breed disaster recovery solutions that meet the demands of the market today. These combined offerings solve customers' critical disaster recovery business challenges, enabling increased business continuity and lowering the overall total cost of ownership.

	Amazon Web Service Amazon and Riverbed have combined expertise to deliver both a powerful cloud-optimized storage platform and a cloud storage accelerator to enable fast, reliable, secure and simple access to the public cloud. Key benefits of the Riverbed Whitewater cloud storage product combined with Amazon S3 include easy integration into existing backup infrastructure; secure off-site data more effectively; lower data protection costs; and reduce data storage requirements by 20x up to 50x. AWS offers a Simple Storage Service (S3), a tested destination for Riverbed Whitewater backup and archive data. This elastic pay-as-you-go storage is available worldwide with customer designated regions and service levels.
	AT&T’s AT&T and Riverbed have expanded their relationship to provide customers with a simple, efficient way to back up data offsite to cloud storage environments. AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service (SaaS), based on the EMC ATMOS storage platform, is a web services-based storage solution that easily scales up and allows customers to pay only for the storage used. It provides elastic capacity on demand with no commitments, minimums, or limits and allows access to stored data anywhere and anytime. Coupled with Riverbed Whitewater, a cloud storage accelerator, AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service customers can backup data to the cloud faster. Offering improved operational efficiency and reduced cost and complexity, Synaptic receives deduplication data from Whitewater appliance via REST. AT&T also resells and has managed WAN optimization services for customers designed around Riverbed SteelHead appliances.
	Compellent Riverbed and Compellent combine to deliver accelerated disaster recovery operations and increased data protection. Riverbed extends Compellent's robust disaster recovery solutions by slashing the time it takes to replicate data and optimize bandwidth utilization. The joint solution offers customers improved performance – up to 87 percent, improved RPO and RTO, and reduced capacity, bandwidth, and management costs. The solution also improves business continuity processes.
	Equallogic Riverbed SteelHead appliances interoperate with Dell Equallogic PS Series SAN arrays to help optimize data center replication across the WAN. Auto-replication – a SAN-based replication feature provided standard on Dell Equallogic arrays with no additional license costs or activation fees –replicates data from the production data center to a disaster recovery site for fast recovery in case of a production site failure. IT managers can leverage Riverbed SteelHead products to minimize data redundancy and optimize performance. An example of replication showed up to 17x faster to complete.
	EMC Atmos-based clouds Riverbed WAN optimization solutions enable EMC customers of all sizes to overcome a wide range of IT infrastructure performance bottlenecks, including poor application performance, and slow replication and backup, often due to insufficient bandwidth and high latency on the network. So that joint customers can deploy Riverbed WAN optimization solutions into their largest data centers with confidence, Riverbed SteelHead appliances have obtained EMC E-Lab qualification for SRDF, RecoverPoint, MirrorView, Celerra Replicator, and SAN Copy. Riverbed has also partnered with EMC's Atmos unit to deliver a powerful, cloud-optimized storage acceleration platform that enables fast, reliable, and simple access to private and public clouds. Riverbed is a member of the EMC Select Program, which enables EMC and its channel to resell SteelHead appliances. Read our joint customer case studies on 360 Architecture,
	Hitachi Riverbed and Hitachi Data Systems combine to enable highly-scalable IT infrastructure consolidation and optimized data replication for disaster recovery. The joint solution offers customers consolidation of data to a centralized Hitachi High-performance NAS and SAN platform solutions; accelerated access for remote users to their data; accelerated replication for disaster recovery across the WAN; improved RPO and RTO to maximize application availability; and application performance from the DR site when disasters occur.
	IBM IBM storage also shows great results for XIV Remote Mirroring, Global Mirror, and Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM.) XIV qualification has been completed. A sample test showed up to 83% bandwidth reduction. Read our joint customer case studies that include Vinci and Little Diversified Architecture Consulting.
	Microsoft Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM), a member of the Windows Server System family, provides continuous data protection to Windows application and file servers. By working as a disk-based intermediary between high-performance servers and slower tape backup systems, DPM can significantly reduce the time required to restore data lost due to a hardware failure. Riverbed significantly optimizes Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) to deliver LAN-like performance to remote servers Riverbed SteelHead appliances dramatically accelerate DPM operations and significantly reduce WAN bandwidth utilization. A full replica restore can see acceleration 14 times. An end-user recovery operation can be accelerated up to 41x and can see bandwidth reduction up to of 99%.
	NetApp Companies worldwide augment their deployments of NetApp SnapMirror, SnapVault for FAS and V-series storage platforms with Riverbed's comprehensive WAN optimization appliances to make their infrastructure faster, less expensive, and more responsive. Riverbed WAN optimization solutions and NetApp enterprise-ready storage and data protection solutions help customers to improve remote replication and disaster recovery processes, while driving down costs, improving productivity, and avoiding bandwidth upgrades. A performance example has shown up to 89% less traffic for Snap Mirror. Read our joint customer case studies on Paul Hastings and G&T Conveyor.
	Vision Solutions Using innovative products from Vision Solutions (formerly Double-Take), IT organizations can move, protect, and recover workloads across any distance and any combination of server environments. Organizations are aggressively moving to WAN-based backup approached to protect data located on servers and databases in remote offices. By combining Riverbed SteelHead appliances with Double-Take, enterprises can significantly improve backup and recovery windows over a WAN, which means they can do more frequent, more reliable backups across the WAN from any branch office or any data center.
	VMware Organizations of all sizes look to VMware and Riverbed to accelerate and simplify disaster recovery. By combining Riverbed award-winning WAN optimization solutions with VMware's virtualization products, enterprises can implement a high performance DR solution that will result in improved uptime of data while simultaneously reducing bandwidth costs.