The Birmingham Riverbed User Group met for its inaugural lunch meeting last Tuesday, September 13th and the meeting was a great success! The agenda of the meeting was as follows:
- Welcome by myself as group president
- Introductions
- User success stories
- This was a recap of Burr Forman's experience with Riverbed and a short explanation of which products we own and how we use them. I also recapped my history with Riverbed products as I am now at my third different law firm and have selected and implemented Riverbed products since 2005 and utilized them at each firm.
- Roadmap of Riverbed products and services led by Evan Marcus from Riverbed
- Question & answer session
- Round-table discussions from user group members
The group is looking forward to all of the new and exciting updates but the topic that generated the most buzz was the Whitewater product which is already available. The ability to get rid of the costs and complexities of either tape or disk-based backups and utilize the cloud in a secure and reasonably-priced way is something that all the attendees thought would be a game-changer. I know my firm is currently in discussions with our Riverbed reseller and with Riverbed engineers and our hope is that we will be able to implement Whitewater and retire all of our disk-based arrays that are currently in use for backup and redundancy of that backup data. That alone would save us a very large sum of money on upgrades and maintenance for those particular products and would save again when our secondary datacenter is built out later next year by eliminating the need to purchase additional arrays.
We plan to host 3-4 meetings per year, including a social event where members and prospective customers can talk openly amongst each other and with Riverbed employees and share the good, bad and ugly of our respective environments and find solutions for whatever issues we have.
Until next time,
David Michel
