Riverbed

Riverbed Technology announced Thursday that Lighthouse eDiscovery, a provider of electronic discovery services, replaced its tape-based backup system with the Riverbed Whitewater cloud storage gateway to improve its backup and disaster recovery (DR) processes.

The Whitewater gateway enabled Lighthouse to securely accelerate backup and recovery operations to the public cloud for improved data protection. With the Riverbed solution, Lighthouse has reduced storage requirements by more than 12 times, which has led to lower cloud storage fees and reduced IT management time. More importantly, restore times have been reduced down to less than two hours.

Lighthouse serves more than 100 corporations, law firms and government agencies nationally with a full spectrum of litigation support solutions. In order to stay on the leading edge of technology, Lighthouse began looking at cloud storage as an option to improve its DR strategy. Lighthouse decided to move its backup data to the Amazon Simple Storage Service cloud storage but realized it needed a fast, secure and reliable way to move data in and out of the cloud. The company chose to deploy Whitewater gateways.

"While cloud storage was an attractive option for us due to its immediate availability, Riverbed was a critical component of making DR in the cloud a reality. We were able to configure the Whitewater gateway in about an hour without having to replace our existing backup tool, Symantec Backup Exec," said Marc Larkin, system administrator at Lighthouse. "Our data protection strategy is much more reliable than with tape and our backups feel local!"

The Whitewater gateway deduplicates, compresses, and encrypts backup data sets and stores them in a local intelligent cache before securely transferring backup data to cloud storage environments.

"The Whitewater gateway deployment reduced our cloud storage requirements by 12.26x, which means we are sending a smaller data set to the Amazon cloud. This translates to lower cloud storage fees and more frequent backups. Most importantly, it means faster recoveries," added Larkin.

"If we were still using a tape-based backup, data recovery would be a long, tedious process, but with the Riverbed solution, we can complete a full recovery in less than two hours. We are very impressed!" said Stuart Tull, director of information technology at Lighthouse. "Our cloud storage-based data protection is greatly enhanced with the Whitewater gateway at a significantly lower price than the continuing cost of replacing tape as well as ongoing and time consuming maintenance."

The IT team now spends an average of seven hours less each week on managing the backup process. "For a lean IT group like ours, it's a huge deal!" concluded Tull.