Category: Overland Storage

As small and midsize businesses (SMBs) take a look at the worsening economic crisis and begin to understand how it impacts them, reality is starting to set in. A recent survey reports that nearly 80 percent of SMBs are not convinced the U.S. government’s $700 billion financial bailout will help them. Furthermore, SMBs’ purchasing power is being drastically altered, which will undoubtedly cause ripple effects throughout the economy. Case in point, the reluctance and abrupt spending halt of SMBs has impacted SAP — causing SAP’s third-quarter earnings to tank. This has already prompted SAP to implement financial help and discounts on its software that is explicitly intended for SMBs.

The statement that “data growth is continuing at an exponential rate” rarely ever conveys the exact location of the data that is growing so fast. But it just so happens that a consensus of industry analysts agree the majority of this rapidly growing pool of corporate data (up to 60 percent) now resides at remote corporate offices. While more companies now recognize that the data created and stored at remote sites is vital to their ongoing success, protecting it presents a unique set of challenges. Of these challenges, moving backup data over corporate WANs is one of greatest.

Too often one of the requirements in the enterprise data protection equation for corporate remote and branch offices (ROBOs) is “rip-and-replace.” While this approach is fine for dealing with aging hardware and software, it ignores the majority of scenarios where ROBOs have hardware or software that they can’t afford to replace but are being asked to rip out anyway in favor of OEMs’ latest solution. ROBOs are just as apt to want a “bolt-on” solution that enables adding new technology to their environment while continuing to use what’s already in place. The latter scenario is what Overland Storage’s announcement of its REO Compass is designed to provide.

To say that over the last few years Overland Storage has experienced a tsunami of events that have dramatically impacted the company would be an understatement. Looking at Overland’s most recent SEC 10-K filing gives some hint as to the challenges of the last few years: HP notified Overland it planned to stop shipping its tape products; Dell agreed to resell Overland’s tape libraries and then cancelled its agreement; Overland then reversed its decision to outsource the manufacturing of its products and bring manufacturing back in house. These developments, along with the rapid shift in the general business market from tape to disk as a backup target, led Overland to aggressively pursue the disk-based data protection market while leveraging its legacy tape technologies to deliver end-to-end data protection.

Cross-platform security has long been an issue. If your network is like most, chances are you are tied to the Microsoft Security paradigm, which does not necessarily play well with non-Microsoft permissions and security. This is not a judgment, but an acknowledgement that a growing number of companies operate in a Windows-dominated world. Binding Windows Clients to a Windows Active Directory domain almost always works. Conversely, if companies need to support a mixed operating system environment for clients and then share files and folders between these different operating systems in a Microsoft AD environment, the experience may be less than pleasurable.

A few years ago, companies wondered “What if?” regarding whether the Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives found in consumer-grade PCs would eventually find their way into enterprise-class storage systems. Now, the question no longer is “What if?” but “Where will it stop?” SATA disk drives have found their way into existing SAN and NAS storage systems as well as emerging Cloud and Grid storage architectures. As this has occurred, SATA disk drives have evolved to keep pace with new demands that companies of all sizes are placing on them.

The Swiss Army Knife’s endearing legacy is that of a tool that has helped everyone from soldiers in the late 1800s to astronauts in the twentieth century deal with whatever situations they might encounter. Of course, part of its appeal is being a low-cost, lightweight, multi-faceted instrument that provides a multiple of options. Much of its cool factor comes from its design to handle whatever challenge an individual might confront. Today’s SMBs face similar challenges. SMBs are entering the largely unknown worlds of D2D2T (disk-to-disk-to-tape) and network attached storage (NAS), for which they need their own version of a Swiss Army Knife to offset the complexities that these storage environments create.

Anecdotal evidence gathered by DCIG suggests that 50 percent or more of all companies deploying disk-based storage systems in multiple sites as backup targets are also opting to purchase replication software that replicates data between sites for enhanced data protection. For many companies, this purchase may represent their first foray into replication of any kind. As a result, it’s not surprising that many are unprepared for the types of questions to ask when selecting replication software or what to expect from the accompanying management software.

Overland Storage’s recent acquisition of the Snap Server line of NAS storage products from Adaptec breathes new life into a product line that had all but faded from view. Adaptec’s lack of focus on the Snap Server line coupled with its changing message about what it intended to do with it made Snap Server a logical acquisition target for Overland Storage, which was actively looking to add NAS to its portfolio of disk-based backup products. But now that Overland Storage has it, the big job of explaining how Snap Server fits into customer backup environments falls to Steve Rogers, Overland Storage’s Director of Product & Solutions Marketing.

Our understanding of LTO-4 tape drive encryption is that individual tape drive vendors may encrypt data in different manners. We cautioned that if you have not standardized on an LTO-4 tape drive vendor, an LTO-4 tape cartridge encrypted by one vendor’s drive may not be readable on another’s LTO-4 tape drive. Our specific quote was “So even if all your tape drives are LTO-4, if they are from different vendors, an LTO tape encrypted by one tape drive may not work in another.”