Riverbed (News - Alert) Technology, the IT performance company, announced that it is expanding the ecosystem for the Riverbed Whitewater family of cloud storage gateway solutions for data protection.

In a release, Ray Villeneuve, general manager of cloud storage at Riverbed said, “By working closely with more than 15 leading solution providers that are now supported by Whitewater gateways, we’re giving customers the most comprehensive choices for their cloud-based data protection initiatives.”

“With Whitewater gateways, customers now have flexibility that previously was not possible. This ensures organizations can enhance their data protection strategies with solutions that match their requirements while providing a clear and simple path for data protection in the cloud,” Villeneuve added.

Company sources added that this will offer organizations greater choice and flexibility in replacing tape storage with a fast, secure and cost-efficient solution that can seamlessly off-site data to cloud storage environments.

It was revealed that Riverbed has increased the number of cloud storage, backup software, and critical database protection solutions to over 15, that are optimally supported by Whitewater. The Whitewater gateway ecosystem now encompasses cloud storage solutions Windows Azure, Rackspace Cloud Files and OpenStack Object Storage (Swift); backup software CommVault (News - Alert) Simpana for Backup and Recovery, HP Data Protector and Veeam Backup and Replication.

It also features database protection solutions Microsoft SQL Server backup and restore and Oracle (News - Alert) Recovery Manager (RMAN). Riverbed offers flexibility and choice and hence allows its customers to move to cloud storage to enhance their data protection strategies, said officials.

Whitewater gateways are capable of deduplicating, compressing and encrypting data in order to reduce storage costs in the cloud. This helps organizations to easily and securely obtain the benefits of the public cloud’s economies of scale, flexibility, scalability and pay-per-use pricing, besides eliminating the need to make changes to their existing infrastructure.

This helps avoid labor-intensive tape backup and tape infrastructure management thereby freeing data protection staff. If disaster strikes the secure cloud copy can be restored to any location and hence makes for a strong DR solution. Whitewater gateways connect directly to the data protection software and also to cloud service provider application programming interfaces (APIs), added officials.

Organizations can set up Whitewater fast and move data rapidly. The broad ecosystem offered by Whitewater gateways are used by companies like GeoEngineers, Psomas, SM Energy and Northland Services.