Category: Overland Storage

While SaaS (Software as a Service) gets most of the press, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is finding its way into increasing numbers of corporate data centers. Parallel SCSI is a proven and reliable data transfer standard and serves the data center well, but all good things must eventually come to an end. With U320 parallel SCSI being the last stop on the SCSI roadmap, and with the advantages SAS has to offer over parallel SCSI, SAS is almost a certainty for the industry at large and your company specifically.

In a previous blog entry we discussed different technologies available to encrypt backup tapes and the unlimited liabilities associated with the breach of an unencrypted backup tape. Making sure the data on that tape is encrypted, however, is not an automatic cure-all. After all, encryption is only as strong as your key management and, in some states, encrypting backup tapes is no longer enough to protect your company from future risks.

Even if you do not closely monitor the data storage space, chances are still above average that you have seen headlines about BNY Mellon Bank losing unencrypted backup tapes and the ensuing media storm that surrounded this disaster. Since that loss occurred, the aftermath has expanded to affect clients from two other banks. Data losses can occur for any reason. They could be the work of a well-disciplined, external network attack or simply stumbling corporate negligence. In either case, it is unfortunately customers who suffer most as their personal information is compromised.

While the tape market is not growing as fast as it was in previous years, IDC announced that in calendar year 2007 LTO drive shipments increased by 15 percent over the previous year and the midrange tape automation market generated $1.3 billion in revenue. This robust market continues to spur innovation from companies such as Overland Storage, whose customer base still heavily relies upon NEO SERIES tape libraries and the ARCvault family of autoloaders and libraries as part of their data protection strategies. According to Peri Grover, Overland Storage’s Director of Product Management, innovation remains important to the company’s customers because their data storage requirements continue to grow. “It may seem obvious, but companies still need technologies – including tape technologies – that can keep up with this growth,” she says.

Overland Storage’s ULTAMUS RAID near-line data protection products and REO SERIES disk-based backup solutions provide a solid starting point for addressing customers’ data protection requirements. However, Pendekanti astutely points out that the market is ravenous for innovation and it’s obvious from recent management changes that Overland Storage feels the need to pick up the pace to become more competitive in the rapidly changing data protection market.

It is no secret that Overland Storage (Nasdaq: OVRL) endured a period of declining sales and management shake-ups in 2007 and 2008. A new CEO, VP of worldwide sales and VP of marketing in the past year indicate the company is trying to right itself from a leadership perspective. These changes provide insight as to where Overland Storage intends to go as it starts its makeover. Yet this transition will be far from easy as traditional technologies like tape libraries and drives are now taking secondary roles in organizational backup processes. Because of this, Overland Storage needs to make more than just leadership changes but move disk-based storage and deduplication products to the forefront of its product strategy.

Have you ever looked at a technology solution that left you wondering why a specific technology matters? I often look at a technology solution and take note of its many features but then may walk away thinking it was a slick presentation but wonder why I should care about it? So when I evaluate a technology solution, I first look to see if it solves a real problem. This can include making me more productive, addressing a key operational pain point or in some way reducing operational costs.

Configuring, allocating and then managing storage capacity on storage systems has been to date been a very tenuous proposition. To address this, thin provisioning has recently emerged as a way for storage systems to only reserve the storage capacity that is actually needed. By monitoring when data is written to a storage system, it eliminates the need to allocate extra, unneeded storage capacity for an application. In so doing, thin provisioning provides a more efficient and cost effective approach to storage capacity management. However to date thin provisioning has been the exclusive domain of a few NAS and SAN based storage systems.

Any time one looks at midrange backup appliances, the appliances are almost always NAS based. When configured this way, the backup appliance is attached to the local LAN it appears as a filer server to the backup server and files are backed up to a folder on that appliance. Though I initially called to speak to Overland Storage’s Senior Product Manager, Jeff Graham, about REO’s Dynamic Virtual Tape (DVT) technology, I first wanted to get some clarification on why Overland Storage’s REO-series appliances are configured as Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs) rather than as a NAS-based appliance.

In case no one has noticed lately, the number of ways in which companies can configure disk-based storage systems to protect their data has multiplied significantly. This fact was brought clearly into focus by a pre-recorded video lecture that I recently watched on Overland Storage’s Tiered Data Protection (TDP) website.