There's a catch with cloud storage, says Robert Healey, Marketing Evangelist, APAC & Japan, Riverbed Technology. “Moving your company’s data storage to someone else’s data centre half-way across the world, while potentially cheaper than building in-house infrastructure, will have huge impact on performance,” he says. The same performance degradation is experienced by cloud-based software applications as distance and network latency across the WAN grows.

To solve the application performance problems caused by the distance between the enterprise and their cloud operator’s remote data centre, cloud-specifc WAN optimisation technology is the only clear solution, Healey feels. Using it in storage environments allows companies to back up and restore more data quickly, while reducing costs. “Our new cloud-storage optimisation technology promises to reduce both cost and complexity for cloud storage services — without any impact on performance,” he says.

The company has recently announced the release of the its WAN optimisation device Steelhead 7050, which uses the new Solid State Disk technology, has 10GE network interfaces and can de-duplicate (compress) storage and other traffc across the WAN at multi-Gigabit rates.

“We are working towards the release of cloud-specific versions of its products to accelerate remote access to cloud-based software applications and storage services. This technology is already in trial stages and is showing unprecedented throughput and performance,” says Healey.

vinita.gupta@9dot9.in