Riverbed extended its Whitewater cloud storage range with the announcement of three new gateway models, targeted at bringing SMBs into the cloud for data protection.

The new 510 and 710 models are purpose-built for SMBs, while the Whitewater model 2010 is designed for the mid-sized enterprise, with targeted-use cases in large enterprise.

"As many organisations are grappling with the explosion in data growth in their IT environments, cloud storage has emerged as an attractive data protection option. SMBs can quickly and easily add offsite protection capabilities, but only pay for storage as needed and without investing in or managing a secondary data center," said Bob Laliberte, a senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. "As enterprises increase their use of server virtualisation and implement other strategic IT initiatives, the growth and the sheer volume of data present a greater challenge for data protection strategies."

Riverbed is positioning its new Whitewater models as a data protection solution to help organisations hasten recovery times while driving down the cost of back up.

Whitewater cloud storage gateways deduplicate, compress and encrypt backup data sets before storing them in the local cache and securely accelerate them over the network and into the cloud. In the event of a disaster, the secure cloud copy can be restored to any location without the need to purchase and maintain hardware in secondary locations.

"We are bringing the power of a high-performance, secure and flexible cloud storage gateway to our SMB customers to tap into the tremendous benefits of using the public cloud for data protection," said Apurva Davé, vice president of product marketing at Riverbed. "This enables a wider range of organisations to better compete without having to build and maintain a high-capital, high-maintenance infrastructure.