Chicago-Based Trading Firm Spot Deployed Riverbed Whitewater

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced that Spot Trading, LLC, a Chicago-based trading firm, has deployed its Whitewater cloud storage appliances for efficient and secure transport of data to and from Amazon Glacier from Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS).

The switch to the cloud saves the company $500,000 in storage infrastructure costs while securing Spot Trading’s data. By deploying Riverbed Whitewater as part of its cloud strategy, Spot Trading can now encrypt and de-duplicate traffic to the cloud, further reducing deployment costs and securing data sent to and from the cloud. Additionally, in the event of disaster or loss of data, recovery of recent files takes just minutes from the Whitewater appliance, instead of days.

Spot Trading is a technology-focused proprietary trading firm built on applied technology to solve problems in the financial markets. The company has grown from a team of five individuals in 1999 to over 120 professionals working in technology, equity, research, quantitative, administrative and trading roles. The IT team is responsible for ensuring a computing infrastructure for real-time trading. Among its many other responsibilities, the team maintains offsite backups to store trading logs, email and other communications. Backing up to tape and storing data offsite took seven days each month to manage. Moving to cloud-based backup has eliminated the need for tape, including the fees to offsite tapes.

“With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store data in a storage service designed with eleven nines of durability for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions,” said Terry Wise, director, WW partner ecosystem, AWS. “Riverbed Whitewater gives customers added flexibility in how they can access Amazon Glacier for their long-term archival and tape replacement strategies.“

The Whitewater cloud storage appliance saved Spot Trading $500,000 by eliminating the need to upgrade its SAN.

“Riverbed Whitewater gave us a clear path for offloading backups securely to cloud storage in a much more cost-effective way,” said Andrew Girin, IT technical team lead, Spot Trading.

By compressing and deduplicating data before sending it to the cloud, Whitewater reduces the amount of data stored in the cloud up to 30 times, further lowering the cost of storing data in Glacier. Recent data is cached locally so customers experience restores at the speed of disk with cost and durability of the cloud. In addition, the Whitewater appliance encrypts data to keep it safe.

“My concern was how to protect the data and make sure it’s not being accessed by someone else,” said Girin. “By being able to encrypt on the Whitewater appliance, if data is ever exposed, a third party would have nothing but encrypted text.“

Recoveries are also much faster with Whitewater. When backing up to tape and moving data offsite, it took two or three days to recover. When restoring data from Glacier via the appliance, recovery times go down to a few hours and can take as little as a few minutes if the data is cached within the appliance.

During the evaluation of Whitewater, the setup took less than an hour.

“We pointed our existing Symantec Backup Exec to the Whitewater appliance and entered in our Amazon Glacier credentials and we were done,” said Girin.

IT also spends less time on backup and recovery. With tape, it required one or two people managing the backup, which took about seven days of time per month to manage and even more time if recovery was needed.

Girin explained: “With Riverbed Whitewater, we gained a weeks’ time back that can be spent on higher-priority projects, where before it was spent managing backup.“