BackupWorks.com - Data Storage Solutions

Western Digital (WD): Fiscal 2Q12 Financial Results and Thailand Impact

2012-01-24T08:57:00.000-08:00

HDD shipped down 51% sequentially, average selling price up 50%

(in US$ millions)	2Q11	2Q12	6 mo. 11	6 mo. 12
Revenues	2,475	1,995	4,871	4,689
*Growth*		-19%		*-4%*
Net income (loss)	225	145	422	384

Western Digital Corp. reported revenue of $2.0 billion, hard-drive unit shipments of 28.5 million and net income of $145 million, or $0.61 per share, for its second fiscal quarter ended Dec. 30, 2011.

Excluding charges and expenses related to the Thailand flooding and the planned acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, non-GAAP net income was $358 million, or $1.51 per share.

During the quarter, the company incurred charges and expenses of $199 million related to the flooding and expenses of $14 million associated with the planned acquisition of HGST.

In the year-ago quarter, the company reported revenue of $2.5 billion, net income of $225 million, or $0.96 per share, and shipped 52.2 million hard drives.

The company generated $378 million in cash from operations during the December quarter, ending with total cash and cash equivalents of $3.9 billion.

Non-GAAP net income for the second quarter fiscal 2012 consists of GAAP net income of $145 million plus $199 million for charges and expenses related to the flooding and $14 million of acquisition-related expenses. Non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.51 for the second quarter is calculated by using the same 237 million diluted shares as is used for GAAP earnings per share.

Operations Update
The company also announced it has made significant additional progress to restore its manufacturing capacity following the recent flooding in Thailand. It has continued to ramp HDD production in Thailand and yesterday resumed slider production which had been suspended since October 10. The company now believes its manufacturing capacity will be back to pre-flood capabilities in the quarter ending September 2012.

" We have made substantial progress in restoring WD's manufacturing capabilities in the aftermath of the historic flooding in Thailand, and this is reflected in our second quarter financial results and in the resumption of our operations there," said John Coyne, president and chief executive officer. "While much work remains to be done over the next several quarters to reach our pre-flood manufacturing capabilities, the progress thus far is significantly ahead of our original expectations and is a tribute to the dedicated and effective actions of our employees, contractors and Thai government agencies, the efforts of our supply partners and the support of our customers. We are grateful to all involved in this extraordinary effort."

HGST Acquisition
The company's plan to complete the acquisition of HGST is on track to close by March 2012. The company continues to work on obtaining the regulatory approval of the transaction from the remaining government agencies.

Abstracts of the earnings call transcript:

John Coyne, president and CEO:
"We believe industry shipments in the December quarter were about 119 million units, which included approximately 11 million units of pre-flood inventory. Today, one quarter after the floods hit and despite the industry's heroic recovery efforts, supply remains significantly constrained. We believe this condition will persist throughout calendar 2012 with gradual improvement during the year, with industry production in the June quarter approaching pre-flood quarterly build levels.
"However, with the expected uptick in demand in the back half of the year, rollover demand from the current shortages and inventories throughout the supply chain at record lows, from component supply through HDD and system manufacturing and distribution and retail channels, we believe the pipeline will not be refilled to normal levels until the first half of calendar 2013.
"On November 18, 2011, an arbitration award of $525 million was rendered against WD. Earlier today, the arbitrator awarded prejudgment interest in the amount of $105 million. WD will promptly file a petition to vacate the award on the grounds that the arbitrator exceeded his authority and failed to consider relevant evidence. We anticipate that the court will hear our arguments on our petition in March or April of 2012, and issue a decision sometime thereafter.
"So we think that while there will be a gradual reduction of the pricing that's being driven by the imbalance between supply and demand in a stabilized situation where inventories have been rebuilt throughout the chain to normal levels, which we anticipate will be in the first half of 2013 calendar year. That when prices stabilize in that environment, we expect they will be at a higher level than pre-flood due to the incremental costs that I just outlined."

COO, Tim Leyden, COO:
"We are enhancing our infrastructure by extending slider production capacity and capability into Malaysia in order to mitigate risk. We expect to have Malaysian sliders shipping in our HDDs in the June quarter.
"We are currently shipping 1 terabyte per platter of 3.5-inch and 500 gigabytes per platter of 2.5-inch drives in volume.
" (...) we have our 900-gigabyte 2.5-inch SAS product in qualification at multiple OEMs.
"In general, channels with shorter inventory pipelines are getting higher and more immediate product allocations, while channels with longer inventory pipelines are expected to deplete available inventory before receiving further product allocation.
" (...) we are targeting throughput to approach 60%, 80% and 100% of pre-flood production volumes in the March, June and September quarters, respectively.
"Average selling price was approximately $69 per unit, up $22 from the year ago quarter and up $23 from the September quarter. There were two customers, which each comprised 10% or more of our total revenue: Acer and Dell.
"OEM sales represented 59% of revenue, up from 45% in the prior year and 53% in the September quarter. Distribution channel sales represented 25% of revenue, down from 33% in the prior year and 29% in the September quarter. Retail sales as a percent of revenue were 16%, down from prior year's 22% and September's 18%.
"Revenue from sales of our branded products was $328 million, down 40% from the year ago quarter and 33% from the September quarter.
"Our gross margin for the quarter was 32.5%, up from 19.2% in the year ago quarter and 20.1% in the September quarter."

WD Shares Up on Fee Waiver for Thai Operations

2011-11-29T12:47:00.000-08:00

Shares of Irvine-based disk drive maker Western Digital Corp. rose Tuesday after the Thai government said it would waive import fees on some products to help companies in the region affected by widespread flooding and related damage.

Investors sent Western Digital shares up 4.4% in early afternoon New York trading to a market value of about $6.5 billion on word of the assistance.

The measure was announced Tuesday by Thailand Deputy Prime Minister and Commerce Minister Kittiratt Na-Ranong. It includes waving import duties for some machinery, spare parts and finished goods through next June.

Western Digital was forced to close its production plants in Thailand, and will likely lose its title as the world’s largest disk drive maker this quarter.

Its flooded buildings in Thailand house assembly and testing operations along with a “substantial majority” of the company’s slider fabrication operations, which account for a key component in disk drives, Chief Operating Officer Tim Leyden said in the recent conference call.

Western Digital is working to shift some of those operations to its facility in Malaysia.

Its recent guidance on the current quarter shed some light on a grim situation in Thailand, which is struggling with flooding caused by a heavier-than-usual monsoon season punctuated by typhoons.

Executives said Western Digital expects to ship between 22 million and 26 million hard drives in the December quarter, down nearly 59% from the prior period.

The company has held the market share lead over Scotts Valley-based rival Seagate Technologies LLC for nearly two years. It could slip to No. 3 or No. 4 worldwide, according to El Segundo-based market tracker iSuppli Corp., a unit of IHS Inc.

Thailand is the world’s second-largest producer of disk drives behind China and a major supplier of hard drive components.

Western Digital ships about 60% of its disk drives from Thailand, where it employs some 37,000 people.

Imation Introduces Scalable Storage Platform for SMBs - InfiniVault, RDX, A8, LTO Ultrium

2011-10-19T12:51:00.000-07:00

Imation Corp. unveiled a scalable storage portfolio of data protection and data archive products designed to help data-intensive, compliance-driven SMBs retain, retrieve and recover valuable data.

"Many SMBs feel trapped between a rock and a hard place with unstructured data storage and compliance requirements that are too sophisticated for off-the-shelf storage products, yet SMBs can't justify the cost and complexity of enterprise class solutions," said Ian Williams, vice president, global marketing and product management, Imation. "We've solved that problem by delivering a suite of tiered storage products right-sized for today's data-intensive SMBs. Backed by Imation's global reach, strong channel relationships and data storage experience spanning nearly 60 years, our new scalable storage solutions help SMBs cost-effectively embrace the rapidly expanding digital world, yet frees them up to run a productive business."

Imation's scalable storage platform features new Imation InfiniVault and Imation DataGuard multi-tiered data-archive and data-protection appliances, as well as the company's existing Imation RDX removable hard disk storage and LTO technologies. The portfolio provides compliant solutions for SMBs to better retain, retrieve and recover their data.

"Compliance and the explosion of unstructured data have changed the way SMBs must retain, retrieve and recover their data. For years, SMBs have pieced together solutions from different storage companies which didn't always work well together, Imation is offering a seamlessly integrated portfolio of tiered and flexible storage solutions geared to the needs of SMBs. These solutions include cloud-enabling storage capabilities as well as archive quality media and appliances designed to enable SMBs to efficiently scale their storage according to their data archive and data protection needs."

The launch of Imation's tiered storage platform with data archive and data protection products for SMBs is another step in Imation's strategy to grow in the secure and scalable storage markets. Already in data storage, the company is making technology investments to extend its position in data storage, security, archiving and protection, including the 2011 acquisitions of MXI Security, IronKey's secure hardware business and the assets of ProStor Systems, including the InfiniVault product line.

About Imation's Scalable Storage Portfolio
The Imation InfiniVault data-archive appliance provides SMBs a storage option for managing unstructured data, helps meet data retention requirements and utilizes hard drives, RDX drives and the cloud to deliver elastic vaults of online, nearline and offline storage. The Imation line includes four models - including the Imation InfiniVault 5, 35, 70 and DICOM - to meet size and industry requirements. Imation InfiniVault data-archive appliances are available in the U.S. through authorized Imation resellers and dealers.

The Imation DataGuard data-protection appliance is a disaster-tolerant backup appliance using hard drives and RDX drives to provide a multi-layer data protection target within existing backup infrastructures. Designed as both tower and rack models, DataGuard uses RDX removable hard drives to retain backups and to seed the cloud infrastructure. Models include the Imation DataGuard T5R, R4 and the R16, and will be available through authorized Imation resellers and dealers in early 2012.

Purpose built to mitigate data loss, retain long-term data and support removable media workflows, Imation's line of stand alone and internal mounted RDX hardware combines the best of tape backup with hard disk drive storage and delivers removability, portability reliability, faster transfer rates and file retrieval. Currently available through authorized Imation resellers and dealers, models include the RDX A8 Storage Array and RDX USB 2.0 and 3.0 Internal and External Docks.

Imation's LTO Hardware is available as a single tape drive system or multiple drive library systems in either rack mount or standalone configurations. Models include the LTO-4 and LTO-5 HH SAS Tape Drives, and L1200 LTO 2U and L1400 LTO 4U Tape Libraries. Imation's LTO Hardware products will be available through authorized Imation resellers and dealers in November 2011.

Overland Storage NEO 8000e Wins "Made in the USA" Golden Bridge Award

2011-08-15T17:08:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage has received the prestigious "Made in the USA" Golden Bridge Award for its commitment to 100% US-based manufacturing of its NEO 8000e enterprise tape library. The coveted annual Golden Bridge Awards program encompasses the world's best in organizational products, performance and services as well as executives and management teams from every major industry. Public, private, for-profit and non-profit organizations from all over the world were eligible to submit nominations.

In order to qualify for the "Made in the USA" category, products must have been completely manufactured in the USA and could not contain any foreign content. With its primary manufacturing location based in San Diego, California, Overland Storage is one of the only storage companies in the industry that currently manufactures products in the USA. Overland Storage is committed to US-based manufacturing; in fact, all Overland Storage tape libraries are 100% produced and manufactured in the US, including the NEO 8000e.

"Maintaining US-based operations is extremely important for Overland Storage and being named a winner of the Golden Bridge Awards for the 'Made in the USA' category highlights our continued dedication to domestic production," said Eric Kelly, CEO, Overland Storage. "The manufacturing sector of the US economy has experienced a decline in recent years, yet we remain committed to reinvesting and supporting the American economy by fostering domestic production, and we are proud that our tape products are manufactured in the US."

The NEO 8000e is the next generation LTO-5 tape library solution from Overland Storage that is specifically designed for large, data intensive businesses. Built on the patented, award-winning Overland Storage NEO architecture, the NEO 8000e effortlessly expands to meet changing data storage needs and provides high data availability, redundancy and serviceability. With storage capacity of up to 3PB and rapid data transfer rates of up to 24TB/hour, the NEO 8000e delivers enterprise class data protection at a price typically associated with midrange solutions.

More than forty judges from a broad spectrum of industry voices from around the world participated and the averages of their scores determined the 2011 Golden Bridge Business Awards winners. The winners were announced during the awards ceremony on August 10, 2011 in New York.

Overland Storage enhances product service and support offerings

2011-07-13T14:25:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage, Inc. the trusted global provider of effortless data management and data protection solutions across the data lifecycle, today announced enhanced OverlandCare service offerings for the company’s entire line of SnapServer NAS, SnapSAN, NEO Series tape products and REO Series VTL solutions. Featuring new onsite service and installation options, round-the-clock phone access to solution experts, as well as proof of concept and architectural design offerings, the expanded OverlandCare program strengthens the company’s ability to provide comprehensive technical assistance on a global scale. The enterprise-class components and flexibility of the tiered offering also empower Overland channel partners to easily customize and sell complete service and support solutions to meet customers’ specific needs.

Overland’s new centralized global solution call center integrates with its regional solution call center infrastructure across all of the company’s product lines. This network of solution centers provides a framework of support and services designed to enable customers to spend less time managing their infrastructure and focus more on technology innovation to grow their business.

Key Benefits of OverlandCare

Significant investment by Overland Storage in infrastructure and solution call center resources to ensure quick response and one-call resolution for customers
24x7x365 global call center technical support now available on all Overland Storage products
Optional four-hour onsite support now available worldwide on all SnapServer NAS, SnapSAN, NEO Series Tape and REO Series VTL products
Onsite installation services and support for the entire Overland Storage line of data backup and data protection products
Proof of concept and architectural design services available for the deployment of complex solutions within customers infrastructure
Warranty certification delivery system, featuring automatic electronic distribution of warranty certificates and entitlement validation
Secure service portal, including online product registration and access to services-related information such as the ability to track and log service calls in real time

“Strengthening our services offerings for all Overland Storage products worldwide is an important component of our commitment to making enterprise-class support and services available to companies of all sizes,” said Eric Kelly, CEO of Overland Storage. “Even as the amount of data constantly grows, we believe that the technology to store, manage and protect that data should be easy to buy, easy to deploy and easy to maintain so that companies can focus on their primary business activities. Our enhanced OverlandCare offerings further our ongoing commitment to deliver effortless data protection and data management solutions to the market.”

MOBOTIX CCTV and Overland Storage SnapServer solution stops thefts and vandalism at Saxon church

2011-06-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

There are many items of interest in the church including an ancient stone font with a medieval carved wooden cover, six 14th century misericords, a carved reredos dating from 1890, a Victorian organ and a number of stained glass windows. Following a systematic campaign of metal thefts from the church, Paul Drakes, the Churchwarden at St. Nicholas Church felt he had to act: “We had considered CCTV for a while but the property is a grade-one listed building and over a thousand years old, so we needed to be sensitive to the heritage of the site.”

The parish of St. Nicholas, one of the UK’s oldest churches, deployed CCTV technology from MOBOTIX to protect against theft and vandalism while offering access to special services via the internet.

Paul setup a CCTV solution that provides a complete perimeter and internal view of the two acre site with just six cameras. Four of the MOBOTIX DualDome-D12 cameras cover the external perimeter of the building and just two cover the entire interior. This coverage with such a low camera count was achievable because the image quality of the MOBOTIX camera is so good that it can cover a large area whilst retaining good definition.

The system records 30 days worth of footage on an Overland Storage 2TByte SNAP server (snapserver) and is also linked via a BT broadband connection. The MOBOTIX cameras can automatically telephone a range of preset telephone numbers in the event of movement in and around the church, especially late at night when previous incidents have occurred. Recipients of a phone alert can easily and securely log-in via any internet connected PC or mobile device to view footage from any camera in real-time. “This allows us to quickly and safely assess the situation and take the appropriate measures,” explains Paul.

Since the installation of the CCTV, which Paul believes is the first of its kind in the UK to both protect and deliver church services via the internet; there have been no thefts or incidents of vandalism on the site. “Our congregation have taken to it and we are now planning to open the church over a longer period with visitors able to look around or contact us via a telephone with CCTV helping to provide a level of protection when the church is unmanned.”

Imation, focusing on Storage and Protection Acquires MXI Security

2011-06-07T09:50:00.000-07:00

Imation Corp. has acquired the assets of MXI Security from Memory Experts International, Inc.

After making a strong push with their line of RDX - Removable Disk-Based Storage, This acquisition includes MXI's portable security solutions and technologies, including its OEM business and its line of branded Stealth and Access security products designed to secure and protect the systems, applications and data of governments and enterprises worldwide.

"This acquisition represents another significant step in Imation's strategy to invest in key technology platforms to address customers' needs for data storage, protection and connectivity," said Mark Lucas, president and chief executive officer, Imation Corp. "MXI is an innovative leader in high-security and privacy technologies whose solutions will enhance Imation's ability to meet our global customers' growing needs in information security, compliance and management. The MXI team also brings strong technology skills in secure hardware and software engineering, enterprise security solutions, government-validated encrypted USB devices and cryptology to Imation's research, development and engineering organization."

Imation's strategic focus on data security solutions addresses the growing market need for businesses, governments and end users to protect their ever-increasing amounts of data against loss, theft or security breaches. According to the Ponemon Institute, the cost of data breaches continues to rise annually, with the average organizational cost of a breach reaching $7.2 million in 20101. By 2014, the market for secure data solutions specifically designed to address secure portable storage, digital identity and secure portable computing - protecting against data loss, theft or breach - is expected to reach over $4.5 billion.

Enhanced Overland Storage Fastrack Channel Partner Program

2011-05-24T13:52:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage, today announced that its FastTrack Partner Program – established in March 2010 – played a key role in doubling the company’s branded product sales growth over the past year. Moreover, enhancements to the sales enablement program for worldwide channel partners resulted in ten-fold growth of the registered user base and more than tripled deal registrations. The resources and support partners receive through the FastTrack Partner Program greatly increase sales close rates, benefitting both channel partners and Overland Storage.

“With the evolution of Overland’s FastTrack Partner Program, we have been able to take advantage of new lead generation programs, training and sales tools, resulting in a positive effect on our ability to close opportunities with our customers. In addition, having the security of Overland’s deal registration program makes us more confident that the return on our effort is protected,” said Martin Suzman, vice president of operations at BackupWorks.com.

The FastTrack Partner Program maximizes revenue opportunities and profitability for worldwide channel partners by giving them exclusive access to dedicated Overland sales and marketing programs, personalized offline and online resources, an integrated deal registration program that provides up to 35 percent margin protection for registered sales opportunities, pipeline management and training.

Enhancements to the FastTrack Partner Program in 2011 include:

· Tripling of protected margins on SnapServer rackmount products from 10% to 30%

· Comprehensive profit-maximizing deal registration with automated approvals and tracking

· Improved integrated Overland Partner Portal built on salesforce.com architecture

· Exclusive partner access to new customized resources, content, contests and promotions

· Exclusive access to Overland “PartnerCasts,” a series of educational webinars developed for partners

· Lead generation opportunities and marketing program support

· Dedicated field sales, field engineering and inside sales resources

“The ongoing success of the FastTrack Partner Program has exceeded our expectations,” said Jillian Mansolf, vice president, global sales and marketing, Overland Storage. “We’re continually looking for ways to enhance our programs and listening to our partners and understanding their needs has enabled us to deliver on our commitment to provide the resources and support necessary to help our partners succeed and grow their businesses.”

ProStor Systems Announces the Sale of its RDX® Removable Disk Technology Business

2011-05-19T10:40:00.000-07:00

ProStor Systems, the leader in multi-tiered storage systems for long-term data retention, today announced the sale of its RDX removable disk business. Tandberg Data will acquire the RDX business, including intellectual property and key members of ProStor’s RDX engineering team. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. ProStor Systems is the inventor and original developer of RDX removable disk technology and the only vendor to offer a multi-tiered storage system based on RDX.

RDX removable disk technology has become the industry leader in enterprise-class removable disk storage for backup, disaster protection and archive. ProStor Systems licensed the RDX technology to Tandberg Data to manufacture, market and sell worldwide. Since then, Tandberg Data has been instrumental in RDX technology achieving widespread acceptance and has established itself as the market leader in the removable disk market.

ProStor is the only vendor to offer a multi-tiered storage system based on RDX technology. “In recent months, we’ve enhanced and expanded the ProStor InfiniVault® product line significantly. The sale of the RDX business will enable us to align our resources and focus our attention solely on scaling the InfiniVault product portfolio,” explains Frank Harbist, ProStor Systems’ CEO.

ProStor InfiniVault, a multi-tiered storage system for fixed digital assets, is uniquely suited to provide a cost-effective solution where data is stored at the most efficient level given business retention and retrieval requirements. The InfiniVault offers backward- and forward- compatibility so that any capacity RDX disk can be intermixed in the system, realizing dramatic cost savings as data grows by eliminating the need to purchase a new system. ProStor will continue to offer its full range of RDX capacity points as part of selling the InfiniVault portfolio. ProStor is still unique in offering system-matching warranties for RDX drives that are bought from ProStor as part of an InfiniVault sale.

The InfiniVault product line has been expanding to include features that enable data virtualization across online, nearline, offline, and offsite tiers based on policies. This transaction enables the continued development of significant long-term data management and retention capabilities to come in the future. ProStor continues to experience solid acceleration in number of customers and sales—serving over 200 customers and realizing over 100% growth in sales year over year.

ProStor Systems provides industry-leading solutions for the cost-effective, long-term storage of digital information. ProStor InfiniVault® integrates information management software, online disk, and RDX removable disk to simplify retention management while automating disaster protection and regulatory compliance. InfiniVault provides fast, reliable retrieval of information from a choice of local online, nearline, offline or offsite locations, all while eliminating archive silos and reducing management overhead. This intelligent storage system is replacing optical, tape, and disk in healthcare, document imaging, financial services, digital video archive, service provider, and government markets

Overland Storage Continues to Gain Worldwide Momentum

2011-05-04T15:10:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage Continues to Gain Worldwide Momentum With One of the Industry's Largest Product Deployment Footprints.

Overland Storage the trusted global provider of effortless data management and data protection solutions across the data lifecycle, today announced that the company has shipped more than 400,000 units. Customers include Fortune 1000 companies and organizations across sectors including government, education and healthcare. In addition, the company has 2000 channel partners across 60 countries around the globe. As a result of the company's refocused strategic corporate vision and with the support of Overland channel partners worldwide, the company has experienced a doubling of sales across its SnapServer, SnapSAN and NEO product lines.

"Two years ago we began transforming Overland into a branded products and service company. Overland's branded sales growth and the broadening of our channel partner network are showing that the transition is progressing, and we are very pleased with the advancements toward our objectives," said Eric Kelly, CEO at Overland Storage.

In 2010, Overland introduced three new disk-based solutions: SnapServer N2000, a block-and-file-level NAS or SAN package aimed at virtualized environments; SnapSAN S2000, a feature rich, resource-efficient iSCSI SAN platform for businesses with growing data and SnapSAN S1000, a 2U 12-drive modular SAN solution that delivers highly available storage services for business critical applications that require superior performance. Sales of these new products in 2010 helped double Overland's revenue of disk-based products. Overland also introduced the NEO 8000e, the company's fastest and highest capacity tape library solution specifically designed for large, data intensive businesses.

Overland Storage Appoints Martin Lynch as Vice President of Operations

2011-03-18T17:07:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage announced the appointment of Martin Lynch as vice president of operations. In this position, Lynch will be responsible for the company's strategic and tactical global business operations, including managing end-to-end supply chain and quality for the company.

"We are very pleased to welcome Martin to the Overland executive team to lead the company's global business operations," said Eric Kelly, CEO, Overland Storage. "With over 20 years of experience and a strong background in engineering, Martin will be a great asset as we continue to pursue not only aggressive operating efficiencies but as we develop a product road map that delivers continued value for our customers."

Overland Storage Product lines include both tape and disk solutions such as the SnapServer NAS Solutions, NEO Tape Libraries, and Overland REO VTL products. The Snap Server brand has seen much success with the recent launch of the SnapServer N2000 NAS a 12 bay 24TB solution with expansion capabilities by adding additional N2000 units or up to 7 E2000 24TB each JBODs.

Previously, Lynch served as executive vice president of operations for 2Wire, Inc., where he built the company's operations department from the ground up. In this role, Lynch was responsible for the company's worldwide supply chain, manufacturing, business operations and end-to-end product life cycle as well as new product introduction. Prior to that, Lynch held several executive operations and engineering roles at enterprise and consumer technology companies, including Cornice Inc., Maxtor Corporation, Coulter Corporation and others. Lynch received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Boston University and holds several patents in disk drive channel optimization code.

Overland Storage Announces Successful Private Placement Financing

2011-03-16T12:54:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage has signed definitive agreements for a private placement of 8,722,904 shares of Common Stock of the Company and Warrants to purchase up to 3,838,069 shares of Common Stock for a gross purchase price of approximately $15.4 million on March 16, 2011. The purchase price for one share of Common Stock and a Warrant to purchase 0.44 shares of Common Stock is $1.765. The Warrants will have an exercise price of $1.71 per share, will expire March 21, 2016 and are exercisable in whole or in part, at any time prior to expiration. The transaction is anticipated to close on March 21, 2011 subject to customary closing conditions. The Company intends to use the proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes and working capital, including the funding of product development and sales and marketing expansion, as well as the repayment of certain indebtedness. Overland will continue to expand upon their award winning brands - SnapServer NAS, SnapSAN, Overland Storage NEO Autoloaders and REO VTL lines.

Clinton Group, Inc. has agreed to lead the private placement.

"We are pleased to formally begin our partnership with Eric Kelly and the Overland Storage management team," said Joseph A. De Perio, a portfolio manager of Clinton Group, Inc. "We believe this capital raise provides Overland Storage with a substantial runway to achieve its operational and financial goals and positions the company well for long-term growth and profitability," said De Perio. As part of the transaction, Mr. De Perio has agreed to join the board of directors.

"This additional capital will allow us to accelerate our product development efforts and continue our investment in the sales and marketing resources required to fuel growth of our products in our worldwide channel," said Eric Kelly, President and CEO of Overland Storage. "In addition, the board and I are pleased to welcome Joseph De Perio to the board of directors. Joe's experience, along with Clinton Group's financial commitment, will be invaluable as we continue to drive the business forward and seek to execute on our strategic plan."

SnapServer Sales increased 53% over the prior quarter - Overland Storage

2011-02-17T12:19:00.000-08:00

Overland Storage, Inc. reported second quarter results for its fiscal quarter ended December 31, 2010.

Eric Kelly, President and Chief Executive Officer of Overland Storage, said: "With the support of our channel partners worldwide, we are executing on our plan to increase sales of our higher margin branded products and services. Branded product sales grew 21.7% sequentially and total branded revenue is now 92.3% of total sales, up significantly from the prior quarter," said Kelly. "Additionally I am happy to report that our revenue, gross margin and operating expenses for the first half of FY 2011 were all within the guidance that we previously announced. In addition to achieving these financial objectives, we introduced a new SAN product line and a new NAS product into the marketplace as planned."

Net Revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2011 was $17.9 million, an increase of 2% from the prior quarter and a decrease of 12.2% from the second fiscal quarter of 2010. The net loss for the quarter was $0.9 million, or $0.07 per share, compared to a net loss of $6.5 million, or $0.59 per share, in the prior quarter and net loss of $2.6 million, or $0.47 per share, in the second quarter of 2010. Gross margins for the second quarter of fiscal 2011 were 31.1%, a significant increase from 23.6% the prior quarter, and an increase from the 28.5% in the second quarter of fiscal 2010. Operating expenses were $9.2 million, an improvement of $0.7 million from $9.9 million the prior quarter, including $1 million in non-cash stock compensation expenses in each quarter. We ended the second quarter of fiscal 2011 with cash and cash equivalents were $6.8 million, an increase of $2.5 million from $4.3 million at the end of the prior quarter.

Highlights:

Total branded products revenue, excluding service, increased 21.7% sequentially and 3.2% over the same period a year ago.
The SnapServer and SnapSAN series of disk based products increased 53% over the prior quarter and 95% in the same quarter in the prior year.
NEO SERIES tape products increased 10.7% from the prior quarter.
Gross Margins for the quarter were 31.1%, up 750 basis points from the first quarter and up 250 basis points from the same quarter in the prior year.
The Company generated $3.0 million in other income from the sale of a minority interest in proceeds the company may receive in connection with the current IP litigation.
The Company launched the SnapSAN S1000, a new entry in the midrange SAN marketplace. The S1000 has a modular, scalable, dual controller architecture and was designed to anchor our SnapSAN portfolio and expand our total available market.

Overland's top tech guy: Great things ahead

2011-02-15T15:17:00.000-08:00

Barrall talks tape

We had the chance to talk to Geoff Barrall, the founder of BlueArc and Data Robotics, about his work at Overland Storage, where he is charge of product engineering.

He came into Overland after having been his own boss for two decades but "realised that the challenges are very similar and found my feet". CEO Eric Kelly and sales and marketing VP Jillian Mansolf are great to work with, and "I have the right team in place (including some of my old friends from BlueArc and Data Robotics) and everybody is working really well together".

He couldn't discuss the product roadmap in any specific terms at all, but he did say "it's the most exciting I've ever had", and discussed it in a little more detail.

"On the SNAP Server side of the business it's public knowledge that we acquired the Maxiscale scale-out file system which we're excited to integrate and deliver.

Tape market large and growing

"As for tape it's really exciting for me to be working in that area. My Phd is in Cybernetics and so the fact that I'm actually responsible for delivering robotics for a living now ties right back to that. The tape market is large and growing but Overland has work to do to regain its former share.

"Fortunately very little innovation has been applied to this market for some time (by any vendor) and so it's a great area to be creative and I have one of the few teams remaining in the world with the skills to create the necessary technology."

There's a surprise. Tape product engineering developments haven't been switched off. HP, IBM, Quantum, SpectraLogic and other tape product suppliers can look forward to some interesting competition.

"We also introduced two SAN products," said Barrall. "These seem to be doing well and it's exciting to have a product portfolio to work with that spans NAS, SAN, Archive Disk and Tape. Lots of room for synergy there.

Should people be concerned out the length of time it's taking to produce products from his engineering department? "Anybody who knows engineering will know that it take around 18 months to deliver something new and around 24 for something great. I'm working on that kind of time frame and am very excited about 2011 and beyond."

Todo Backup 2.0 by Easeus for Windows - All-in-one backup and DR software

2011-02-07T15:05:00.000-08:00

EASEUS Software announces the availability of its backup and recovery solutions for Windows workstations and servers. The new versions are mainly for business use including Workstation Edition, Server Edition and Technician Edition, respectively, for specific users. Each provides an all-in-one backup and disaster recovery solution to protect workstations and servers while ensuring business continuity.

The new EASEUS Todo Backup 2.0 is designed to backup and protect Windows Workstation, Desktops and Servers. In this new version, a redesigned graphical user interface and advanced features are introduced to simplify the backup and recovery process.

It helps backup the operating system, applications and all important files in minutes while protecting business from computer failure or potential disasters and minimizing operational downtime.

The new features in EASEUS Todo Backup 2.0:

Fast backup and recovery of system and important files;
File incremental backup save time and storage space;
Schedule backup and simply create and automate regular backups;
Selective file backup and recovery without recovering entire image;
Snapshot restore crashed system in seconds;
Universal restore to dissimilar hardware;
Email notification to monitor success or failure;
Multiple storage places like external hard drive, CD/DVD and even FTP servers;
WinPE and USB bootable disk builder;
Support Windows Server 2000/2003/2008 and Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7;
Password protection.

"EASEUS Todo Backup 2.0 is an extremely easy to use and straightforward backup utility with a host of new features. If you are looking for a good and powerful backup solution for your Windows operating system, Todo Backup is the best one for you," said one editor in the media.

Tandberg RDX - QuickSation 8TB Library

2011-01-26T11:53:00.000-08:00

The RDX QuikStation delivers data protection and offsite disaster recovery for SMB and SME environments in a multi-cartridge 2U configuration. It provides users with the benefits of tape storage, including removability and archivability, and the benefits of disk, namely speed, random access, reliability and high capacity.

Checkout our RDX Storage Options:
Imation RDX, HP RDX, Quantum RDX, Tandberg RDX

Checkout our RDX Free Docking Station Promo - Imation RDX FREE USB Docking Station

Designed and built by Tandberg Data, the RDX QuikStation consists of eight integrated RDX docks that provide up to 8TB of online capacity when populated with 1TB RDX disk cartridges, as well as unlimited offline capacity. Users can choose to configure the unit as either eight individually-addressable iSCSI disk targets or as an emulated tape autoloader or library. Just as tape libraries revolutionized the utility of tape storage, the RDX QuikStation will increase the ways in which removable disk technology will store, protect, archive, transport and restore data.

"The ability to simultaneously read or write from all eight docks in iSCSI mode means that the RDX QuikStation can achieve very high performance rates for faster backup and restore," said Randy Kerns, analyst with the Evaluator Group. "I would encourage users to look at the opportunities presented with the Tandberg Data RDX library. It also can be deployed for less traditional applications, such as providing system snapshot copies, data interchange between remote offices and life support for systems awaiting data from the cloud."

The RDX QuikStation includes features that streamline system deployment and management. With built-in web-based management, the RDX-based library makes remote system configuration, management, operation, status checks and security easy and convenient. Because the RDX QuikStation is compatible with popular backup applications it is able to integrate into a broad range of environments. The RDX QuikStation is already supported by Computer Associates' ARCserve, Symantec Backup Exec, and Tandberg Data's AccuGuard Server backup and deduplication software. Additional ISV support will be announced in the near future.

"The RDX QuikStation is the Swiss Army knife of data protection," said Marije Gould, vice president of marketing for Tandberg Data. "It is a remarkably flexible platform that facilitates consolidation of RDX data protection while providing multiple paths to adding removable disk to existing storage infrastructures. With its ruggedized and standardized RDX format, it also creates the ideal foundation for cloud seeding, bulk load, and bulk restore."

RDX Technology
RDX technology provides a safe, rugged and portable storage choice for SMBs and SMEs. Designed to backup and archive data from servers and workstations, RDX removable disk technology offers users higher capacity, faster speed and lower cost than low-end tape products. Its transfer rate of up to 45MB/second allows users to backup 100GB of data in less than an hour, streamlining the backup process. RDX media is available in capacities ranging from 160GB to 1TB.

The Risks of Cloud: Lessons from Wikileaks

2010-12-07T12:33:00.000-08:00

Considering cloud computing? As well as any technical factors, make sure a Terms of Service issue doesn't put you out of business.

Article by Simon Phipps

It used to take a bailiff and a man with an axe for the door, but the cloud makes it so much easier. If I told you that your entire business infrastructure could be taken offline by a government employee, or even a commercial provider, without judicial review, useful explanation or workable recourse, perhaps because a politician has philosophical issues with your activities, would that worry you? Yet it seems that the most popular brands on the market for cloud computing and web services place you at that risk if you follow the trend to cloud hosting for business infrastructure.

I commented on Friday about the weakness that responses to Wikileaks have exposed in cloud computing, whatever your view of Wikileaks itself. While there are strong incentives to host critical infrastructure in the cloud or using web services, we saw last week both Amazon Web Services and PayPal - flagship brands in cloud computing and web commercial services respectively - suddenly toss customers off their services without judicial review, useful explanation or workable recourse. I'm sure they breached none of their own (voluminous) agreements. We saw other, less well-known companies (Tableau, EveryDNS) follow suit too, and even a Swiss bank finding a handy loophole. We also saw the US Department of Homeland Security start to seize domain names - this time at least by sending a court order to Verisign, albeit sealed, but without useful explanation or workable recourse. I sense we will see more of this happening.

Cloud Danger

This demonstrates the fundamental flaw in web-mediated services. While the Internet itself may have a high immunity to attacks, a monoculture hosted on it does not. We might be able to survive a technical outage, but a political outage or a full-fledged termination of service are likely to put a company that's relied on the cloud for critical infrastructure out of business. Beware those Terms of Service.

Of course, the terms of service of our suppliers have always included termination clauses. But most of us have lived with them because the risk was manageable. Services consumed in the past contributed to infrastructure we controlled and ran ourselves. A state officer wanting to take the sales system offline would need to penetrate the premises and use force, and would need to get a judge somewhere to agree to it happening. But a sales system hosted in the cloud can be taken offline instantly by someone we will never discover, for reasons we can't determine and with no way for us to get them back online.

Worse, a claim that the terms of service have been breached probably leaves us without an avenue for recourse or compensation, regardless of what the service level agreement says about technical outages. There's likely to be a court battle to get either, and when the priority is to get back online again that's not desirable, even assuming we have access to capable legal representation in the country where our provider is based. Finally, if the service we have been consuming is a closed monoculture, finding an alternative will probably mean refactoring our infrastructure. That's costly, time-consuming and may well prove fatal if revenue has been cut off in the interim.

Maybe that sounds excessively pessimistic to you. But it's worth noting that PayPal didn't take action against Wikileaks; they took it against the Wau Holland Foundation, a charitable foundation who had been supporting Wikileaks as one of several activities driven by their charter. They are now unable to use PayPal to collect donations for anything.

Cloud Procurement Checklist

When procuring cloud computing and web services, we need to ask our suppliers why this won't be a problem with their product. They will naturally claim we have nothing to fear if we have nothing to hide. Taking note of the fact that gives us no assurances whatever, we also need to take steps to protect ourselves against the risk. What will those steps be?

First and foremost, a commitment (backed with substantial penalties) that your supplier will never take your service offline intentionally without a substantiated court order is essential. The phrase "at our absolute discretion" is your red flag. It's your infrastructure and thus it's your discretion that matters. Until there's proof of judicial review, no service should be withdrawn without penalty, and suppliers with a track record of behaving otherwise are suspect.

Secondly, ensure your supplier is not a monoculture. Select suppliers deploying open source software in documented ways, so that you always have the freedom to leave. Avoid solutions where the only company enjoying software freedom is your supplier - that's how open core works. Favour open source software which is open-by-rule rather than controlled by your supplier. Your supplier may be concerned that you are escaping their lock-in and charge you more, but it's worth paying extra to get the additional value software freedom creates.

Finally, consider creating a backup plan for how you would operate the service in the event of your supplier suspending their agreements with you. Consider having a backup provider or even a "private cloud" available and keep copies of your runtime environment in VMs ready for deployment. Of course, this will never work unless the software is open source; software freedom isn't just a philosophy.

Don't Just Blame Cloud

Of course, the problem is really not just about cloud computing and web services. Amazon and PayPal shouldn't be boycotted; they are just reptiles, after all. The problem is that we have a society with the governments that it deserves, ready to encourage summary judgement rather than consider matters deeply. The only protection we can even hope to trust today is to take contractual measures and to be ready to self-host in the age of the digital lynch-mob. Software freedom never mattered more.

Overland Storage - SnapSan S1000, iSCSI, Fibre Channel or SAS Connectivity

2010-10-26T10:54:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage expanded its iSCSI storage area network (SAN) portfolio for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) today with the SnapSAN S1000 array, a 2U 12-drive modular array that can scale from 1.2 TB to 120 TB with disk expansions. The SnapSAN S1000 is smaller than the SnapSAN 2000 that Overland brought out in February, but the new system includes a dual controller option for high availability.

The SnapSAN 1000's dual controllers support active-active failover and the devices have redundant, hot-swappable components. It also has supports 10 Gigabit Etherent (10 GbE) iSCSI and either SAS, SATA or Fibre Channel drives, according to Overland solutions marketing manager Joe Disher. It has snapshot capability and automatic disk spin down. The SnapSAN 1000 supports software replication, and Disher said Overland plans array-based replication down the road.

"We are working on getting replication for the S1000 array," he said. "It's really a time to market issue. We had many customers that wanted an encapsulated solution. But we are working on (integrated) replication as well."

Like the SnapSAN 2000, the SnapSAN 1000 is based on the Snap OS Overland acquired when it purchased the Snap Server NAS platform from Adaptec Inc. in 2008. The Snap storage platform is a key piece of Overland's strategy to branch out from its legacy tape business. Last week, Overland acquired the assets of clustered file system startup Maxiscale to build a Snap scale-out NAS system.

"The fact that the new product has dual controllers opens up the addressable market base," said Terri McClure, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "It has the same size chassis as the SnapSAN S2000 but it has two controllers. This is a nice fit for small- to medium-sized businesses that wants high availability on one site."

Overland claims the array can perform at 900 MBps and 200,000 IOPS with a Gigabit Ethernet interface, and 1,300 MBps and 220,000 IOPS at 10GbE.

Pricing for the SnapSAN S1000 starts at $6,895 for a 4 TB iSCSI array. The SnapDisk E1000 expansion unit is available at a starting price of $4,195 without drive

RDX - Removable Disk Technology Advantages and Features

2010-10-19T11:07:00.000-07:00

There is little question that responsible IT management begins with the discipline of data protection, retention and restore. In the unexpected event of system or storage equipment failure the ability to restore lost data is invaluable. RDX (Removable Disk Technology), is a disk-based storage technology designed to protect and archive data. RDX technology combines the best characteristics of tape backup with disk storage to bring you removability, portability, low cost, reliability, fast data transfer rates and instant file retrieval.

RDX Advantages

Superior TCO over the life of the product - RDX removable disk technology requires a one time investment in an RDX dock. Any RDX generation cartridge capacity is compatible. As RDX disk drive capacities increase there is no need to replace the RDX dock as is required with the LTO tape drives. All RDX docks can read any generation cartridge, docks are forward and backward compatible. A dock is typically at a minimum 1/10 the cost of an LTO tape drive for similar performance and capacity – even greater cost differential for newer generation LTO drive.

The RDX dock is recognized by the computer as simply another system disk drive, both serial and random access (drag and drop) backup are possible. This allows specific select files to be backed-up as needed. Files that need to be backed-up for easy transport or archiving are done easily.

Multiple copies are easily made directly from the computer hard drive with no special software.

Adaptable to different size cartridges to fit the need - Since all RDX docks can read any generation cartridge you can right size the cartridge for each back-up requirement, whether exchanging cartridges with a partner or doing daily backups you can choose the cartridge capacity that is right for the job.

RDX cartridges are easily exchanged among partners inside and outside the organization no matter what the cartridge capacity is. Unlike tape, where each tape generation (capacity) requires the same generation tape drive and there is no flexibility to exchange tapes with partners, inside or outside your organization, that are not on the same generation.Additionally, with the drag and drop capabilities just the files you need to exchange can be easily and securely copied.

Cartridges are high capacity (1TB today with new capacities coming out multiple times a year)

RDX Cartridges provide added flexibility in transport choices. They are rugged enough for courier transport or overnight delivery services such as FedEx. Drop in an envelope and ship. A consumer external hard drive or tape cartridges do not have the ruggedness of an RDX cartridge because they have moving parts and risk damage in transit.

Archival capability – 30+ years

Key Features and Benefits

Removability and Portability
- Mobile HDD with a ramp load head
- Random vibration resistant
- ESD (Static) protection
- Protected from drops of up to a meter

Archivability and Reliability
- Up to 30+ years

Simplicity and Security
- Drag-n-drop file transfers
- Cartridge write protection
- WORM capable
- USB connectivity

Affordability
- Very low initial cost
- Very low total cost of ownership

Performance
- Instant random access to data
- Backup 80 GB in less than an hour
- Transfers data up to 45 MB/sec.

Backup Application Compatibility
- Certified with all major backup applications

Forward and Backward Compatibility
- Unbeatable investment protection
- Today's drive/dock is compatible with all current and future cartridges
- Today's cartridges are compatible with all current and future drives/docks

Scalability
- Simply add cartridges to increase capacity
- Customizable for personal and business requirements
- SATA interface for easy system/server integration

Qualstar: Fiscal 4Q10 Financial Results - Tape library revenues at $2.3 million, comparable to the prior year quarter

2010-10-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

Qualstar Corporation reported financial results for the fourth quarter and full year of fiscal 2010 ended June 30, 2010.

Fiscal 2010 fourth quarter financial results revenues for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010 were $4.0 million, compared to $3.8 million for the same quarter of fiscal 2009, an increase of $0.2 million or 5.9 percent. Loss from operations was $627,000 compared to $1.4 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009. Net loss was $575,000 or $(0.05) per basic and diluted share, compared to a net loss of $1.2 million, or $(0.10) per basic and diluted share for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009.

Tape library segment revenues were $2.3 million for the fourth quarter , comparable to the prior year quarter. Power supply segment revenues were $1.7 million for the quarter, compared to $1.4 million in the prior year quarter, an increase of $0.3 million, or 20.9 percent.

Gross profit increased to $1.28 million, or 32.1 percent of net revenues, for the three months ended June 30, 2010, from $941,000, or 25.0 percent of net revenues, for the three months ended June 30, 2009. The increase in gross profit is attributed to a change in product mix and a decrease in reserves.

Research and development expenses for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010 were $749,000, or 18.8 percent of revenues, compared to $939,000 or 24.9 percent of revenues, for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009. The change is due primarily to decreases in R&D material, consultants and compensation related to headcount reductions. Sales and marketing expenses were $528,000, or 13.2 percent of revenues, compared to $640,000 or 17.0 percent of revenues, in the corresponding period last year. The change in sales and marketing expense was due to decreases in advertising and promotion expenses. General and administrative expenses in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010 were $631,000 or 15.8 percent of revenues, compared to $745,000, or 19.8 percent of revenues, for the same period last year. The change in general and administrative expense was primarily due to decreases in accounting and audit and compensation related to headcount reductions.

Commenting on the Company's business results, Bill Gervais, president and chief executive of Qualstar said: " Consolidated fourth quarter revenues of $4.0 million increased 5.9 percent compared to the fourth quarter last year driven by the continued growth in sales of our XLS enterprise class product line and our N2Power business. In fact, the XLS product line generated strong momentum throughout fiscal 2010 with sales increasing nearly 64 percent for the full year. XLS libraries appeal to a diverse array of end users as the flexibility of our solution allows customers to easily expand their data storage capacity as requirements increase over time. N2Power's full year revenues increased to a record $5.8 million and our products continue to generate strong demand due to worldwide requirements for smaller and more energy efficient power supplies."

Mr. Gervais continued: " Looking ahead, we hope that improving customer demand combined with new product development initiatives will result in a positive impact in fiscal 2011."

For fiscal 2010 full year, Qualstar reported revenues of $15.3 million in fiscal 2010, compared with $17.9 million in fiscal 2009. The Company's net loss in fiscal 2010 was $3.1 million or $(0.25) per basic and diluted share, compared with a net loss in fiscal 2009 of $2.6 million, or $(0.21) per basic and diluted share.

Cash , cash equivalents and marketable securities were $24.3 million at June 30, 2010, down from $27.7 million at June 30, 2009. Inventory, net of reserves, at June 30, 2010 was $4.8 million, compared to $5.8 million at June 30, 2009.

First NAS With 3TB HDDs - 4 Bay 12TB RAID

2010-10-04T12:35:00.000-07:00

Seagate Technology LLC introduced a 4-bay and 2-bay desktop network attached storage solutions to help data-intensive small business address evolving storage needs.

The BlackArmor NAS 440 network storage server and BlackArmor NAS 220 network storage server, extend the capacity range of Seagate’s BlackArmor family of storage solutions, enabling businesses to now scale from 1TB to 12TB to help keep pace with the growing stores of high-definition multi-media files and business critical data. Initially, both solutions will come pre-populated with 3TB drives in each bay and will be offered exclusively for 30-days through Seagate.com and select online retailers. For the first 30 days the 12TB BlackArmor NAS 440 for a manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of $1,899.99, and the BlackArmor NAS 220 6TB for a manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of $649.99.

Both the BlackArmor NAS 440 and BlackArmor NAS 220 network storage servers are designed to help businesses with up to 50 employees and little or no IT support, centralize and secure data with maximum uptime by delivering:

Software management tools that are compatible across the family to provide a consistent user experience and future growth path with minimal training or the need for additional support.
Support for Microsoft Active Directory 2000, 2003, 2008 for populating users and groups.
Unparalleled security with powerful hardware-based encryption.
Remote access with the included, web-based Seagate Global Access service and FTP functionality.
start features, ability to easily view or map shared volumes to a computer, or back up the PC from which you are working from, using the BlackArmor Discovery tool software, which automatically displays all BlackArmor NAS products connected to the network.
Full-system backup and recovery helps protect everything on your PC’s hard drive including the operating system, programs and settings. In the event of a system crash or failure, your computer can be restored to a previous point in time with SafetyDrill+ software.
Event email notification to alert the user about status and changes to the server.
Additional USB ports to connect extra USB storage devices, easily share a USB printer or connect an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) to safeguard from power failure.

The BlackArmor NAS 440 server is configured with RAID 5 and ships with 10 backup software licenses out-of-the-box, while the BlackArmor NAS 220 server ships with RAID 1 configuration for automatic data mirroring and 5 backup software licenses. Additional licenses for both products can be purchased in 2 and 5 -set increments.

Overland Storage Now Citrix-Ready

2010-09-28T14:26:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage announced in a press release on its website that the SnapSAN S2000 has been verified as Citrix Ready. This program allows consumers to easily identify solutions and products that are complementary to Citrix environments and that are suggested by third parties to enhance networking, virtualization and cloud computing. "'Overland Storage is a great addition to the storage solutions verified by the Citrix Ready program,' said John Fanelli, vice president of solutions and community marketing at Citrix Systems, Inc. 'Citrix Ready makes it easier for customers to select the most suitable virtualization infrastructure products for their specific needs. By taking part in our program, Overland Storage has enabled its customers to obtain the highest quality user experience available today, and the simplest means for making an informed product purchasing selection.'"

Overland Storage SnapSAN S2000 achieves Windows Server 2008 R2 interoperability certification

2010-09-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage Inc., a provider of effortless data management and data protection solutions across the data lifecycle, announced on Tuesday that its SnapSAN S2000 has been certified as compatible with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, which includes compatibility for Microsoft Hyper-V. Overland's SnapSAN S2000, which was designed for virtualized server environments, including Windows Server environments, completed a rigorous verification process to ensure seamless compatibility with Windows Server 2008 R2 virtualization software, providing confidence in joint solution compatibility.

The SnapSAN S2000 enables companies using Windows Server, Hyper-V, VMware, Unix, Linux, Citrix, or Mac OS X to take advantage of SAN (storage area network) capabilities that have traditionally been considered too complex to manage without specialized expertise, including active-active mirroring and failover, snapshots, replication and Microsoft Cluster Server support. With this certification, SnapSAN is certified to support Microsoft Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) Writer directly for consistent replication and backup and active-active failover for clustered Hyper-V servers.

Featuring integrated Windows management with automated capacity expansion, the solution enables policy-based storage volume growth to occur in a just-in-time manner without IT intervention, eliminating guesswork and over-provisioning. The SnapSAN S2000 scales effortlessly to 192 TB and is a cost effective solution for businesses with virtualized server environments or storage consolidation requirements.

"SnapSAN S2000, our first iSCSI SAN solution, was built from the ground up with virtualized server environments and their managers in mind," said Joe Disher, solutions marketing manager, Overland Storage. "This interoperability certification further ensures that we are able to deliver compatible products that address the specific storage needs of joint customers. Overland remains dedicated to working closely with Microsoft, and offering storage solutions that can be quickly and easily deployed within existing environments for instant scalability and reliability. Overland strives to deliver storage solutions that are truly effortless for businesses of any size."

SnapSAN S2000, along with Overland's Windows Server certified products can be found in the Windows Server Catalog. The SnapSAN S2000 and SnapServer E2000 expansion unit are available from authorized resellers worldwide.

Jillian Mansolf of Overland Storage Recognized by Everything Channel’s CRN Magazine

2010-08-11T12:18:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage, today announced that Jillian Mansolf, Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing, has been recognized by Everything Channel’s CRN Magazine as one of the top Women of the Channel. CRN’s annual list recognizes female executives across vendors’ channel organizations, distributors and solution providers for their accomplishments over the past year and the far-reaching impact they are having on the technology industry going forward. This year’s Women of the Channel were chosen by the editors of CRN magazine based on their achievements as executives and the amount of influence they wield over the technology channel.

Leveraging 20 years of experience successfully driving sales and marketing initiatives at innovation-oriented technology companies including Dell, Maxtor, Snap Appliance and Data Robotics, among others, Jillian is committed to, and succeeding in, rejuvenating Overland's channel strategy while increasing revenue for Overland and its partners worldwide. After joining Overland in the fall of 2009, Mansolf spearheaded the company's initiative to deliver high-margin, effortless data management and data protection solutions to the channel. In addition to overseeing the launches of three new products sold exclusively through the channel, Mansolf unveiled an expanded channel program that offers new ways for partners to increase profitability, including a more robust deal registration program and a partner portal with new sales enablement tools, training and resources.

“Women hold many prominent executive positions at vendor organizations, distributors and solution provider organizations, providing critical insight and influence when it comes to technology and the channel. We want to honor and congratulate these women for their contributions to the industry and their respective organizations,” said Kelley Damore, VP, Editorial Director, Everything Channel.

"All of us at Overland Storage are proud of our strong channel heritage and to be one of the few companies that can truthfully make the bold claim that we have never sold direct—we've been committed to our channel strategy since day one. To that end, we strongly value the relationships that we've built and are as dedicated as ever to our partners worldwide," said Jillian Mansolf. "This recognition from Everything Channel's CRN Magazine is a testament to that dedication and our providing partners with best support and resources possible to maximize revenue opportunities."

A special feature of the Women of the Channel is in the July issue of CRN Magazine and expanded coverage is featured online at www.crn.com.

SnapServer 410 Promotion by Overland Storage

2010-07-09T14:48:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage today announced a new promotion for this quarter. The promotion relates to the SnapServer 410 series, which is a rackmount Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. The 410 series is available in a 2TB, 3TB, 4TB and now an 8TB platform using 4 drives and can be configured in RAID 5.

The promotion announced today is an excellent saving opportunity for end-users to get 2TB of storage absolutely free. Order a 2TB SnapServer 410 NAS appliance by Overland Storage, and receive a 4TB SnapServer NAS unit instead. Another way of looking at it, would be, you're getting a 4TB SnapServer for the price of a 2TB unit.

The SnapServer 410 by Overland Storage offers a simple, safe, flexible and reliable backup solution. You can centrally manage of of your snapservers,locally or remotely, replicate data to one or multiple snapservers with Enterprise Data Replication software (EDR), snapshots, and maximize data availability and protection with advanced RAID options.

This offer is available now through September 20, 2010. Please contact your BackupWorks representative to find out how you can get 2TB of free storage and have best in class SnapServer NAS storage by Overland Storage. The products at hand are as follows:

SnapServer 410 2TB (part # 5325302029)
SnapServer 410 4TB (part # 5325302223)

Please contact us today at 866 801 2944

ATTO Technology to Showcase High-Performance Storage Connectivity Solutions at HP Tech Forum

2010-06-23T10:13:00.000-07:00

ATTO Technology, Inc., a global leader of storage connectivity and infrastructure solutions for data-intensive computing environments, today announced that it will be showing its HP qualified storage connectivity products at HP Technology Forum in Las Vegas, NV. Featured products include ATTO Celerity Fibre Channel HBAs, Xtend SAN iSCSI Initiator and ExpressPCI SCSI HBAs. ATTO products provide HP customers with new opportunities to implement high-availability and high-performance storage connectivity solutions into bandwidth intensive media & entertainment and general IT environments.

The ATTO Celerity line of 8Gb/s and 4Gb/s Fibre Channel Host Adapters have been qualified for use with HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVA) as a high-availability enterprise storage solution for the Mac® market. This solution is designed to enhance workflows and increase productivity by keeping content available in real time for multiple users. Celerity Fibre Channel HBAs feature ATTO’s proprietary MultiPath Director™, a feature-rich solution that provides multiple redundant paths to HP Storage for high-availability access to data. With automatic path failover and load balancing capabilities, ATTO Fibre Channel host bus adapters, with MultiPath Director technology, provide uninterrupted access data and help create a shared storage environment that allows users to efficiently collaborate on projects and consolidate storage resources.

ATTO’s Xtend SAN iSCSI Initiator provides iSCSI SAN connectivity, error handling and security for HP storage systems in Mac OS X environments. It is the first, and most widely-distributed standalone iSCSI initiator that allows Mac users to attach, and load balance, storage connected via an Ethernet-based network. With Xtend SAN, users can remotely access iSCSI storage from multiple servers, increasing accessibility and simplifying storage management, while leveraging existing IT expertise. The combination of Xtend SAN and HP storage systems provides added value for customers whose environments require greater security and automation with features such as a scriptable Command Line Interface, Header and Data Digests, CHAP and iSNS support.

ATTO is also showing ExpressPCI UL5D Low-Profile HBAs that provide high-performance SCSI connectivity for combined with HP MSL Tape libraries. ATTO and HP have teamed together to deliver this solution to HP customers to provide the performance needed for LTO-4 technology. ATTO will have a sampling of its other product lines on hand for demonstration as well, including SAS/SATA RAID and Host Bus Adapters, RAID storage controllers, the newly-released 10GbE Network Adapters and bridging products that connect disk and tape storage to SAS, Fibre Channel and iSCSI SANs. “ATTO continues to deliver high-end connectivity solutions to HP customers presenting new opportunities for HP customers to access storage media and digital content using HP Fibre Channel, iSCSI and SCSI storage systems” states Tom Kolniak, director of products for ATTO Technology. “We are pleased to work closely with HP to provide new opportunities for their customers to more efficiently transfer, manage and store their data.”

ATTO Technology Validates FastFrame FCoE Product Interoperability

2010-06-17T10:02:00.000-07:00

ATTO Technology, announced today successful testing of its FastFrameTM Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) at the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA). Based on ATTO’s time-tested and industry proven Fibre Channel stack, the ATTO FastFrame series of CNA’s, which includes the industry’s first Quad Channel Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) CNA, were successfully tested interoperable with the Fibre Channel and FCoE products provided by other industry-leading Plugfest participants.

The ATTO FastFrame family of 10Gb Ethernet and Converged Network Adapters are designed for the next-generation virtualized and unified data centers which utilize multi-core processors in high-end servers and workstations. The ATTO FastFrame family includes the FastFrame NS11 single port and FastFrame NS12 dual port 10Gb Ethernet Network Adapters, as well as the ATTO FastFrame CS11 single port, FastFrame CS12 dual port and the FastFrame CS14 quad port Converged Network Adapters.

"The FCIA Plugfest provides an excellent opportunity to test for compatibility with a broad range of products and suppliers of Fibre Channel, FCoE and 10Gb Ethernet,” "We expect to see larger scale servers and top of the rack deployments in new and expanding data centers starting in 2010, and then moving to core switches in 2011. ATTO is well positioned to provide customers complete connectivity solutions for these environments.”

With support from the FCIA, FCoE products are becoming available in the marketplace at a rapid pace from all major server, storage and networking companies. FCoE CNAs enable consolidation of data and storage networking traffic onto a single 10GbE link, resulting in significant cost savings for customers while preserving their existing investments in Fibre Channel storage and infrastructure components.

"This Plugfest attended by the industry's major server, storage and networking vendors provided a unique forum to perform formal interoperability testing". "Their participation in the FCIA Plugfest demonstrates a strong commitment to the development and release of FCoE products. Customers stand to benefit greatly from the ability to easily run their network and storage traffic over a single, 10GbE converged fabric that seamlessly interoperates with their existing Fibre Channel devices."

ATTO continues to focus on delivering high-performance, leading edge storage connectivity products that will suit the needs of the marketplace and is pleased to have participated in the FCIA Plugfest to further this development. ATTO’s 10GbE Network Adapters are available today and the CNAs will be released in Q4, 2010.

Tape Drive and Tape Media Market Assessment

2010-06-02T11:04:00.000-07:00

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Backup tape drive and media sales represented a $1.58 billion market in 2009. Drives accounted for $629.28 million and media for $955.53 million. The market for storage hardware was down in the year but had support from LTO 4 drives. Media unit sales were off and revenues were also affected by competitive conditions in the industry.

LTO was the major segment in the backup technology market in 2009. The drives, produced by HP, IBM, Quantum and Tandberg, represented sales of $534.31 million, 83.32% of backup drive revenue. HP led the market for LTO drives with a unit share of 51.11%. While third party suppliers were prominent in the market for LTO media, drive manufacturers HP and IBM supplying complementary private label products were among the major players. HP led the 24.43 million unit LTO media market with a 31.24% unit share. Fuji was second at 12.70%.

Quantum is the sole source of DLT-S drives. HP’s leading share of the 1.36 MM unit DLT-S media segment was 31.98%. The market for DLT-V media comprised of DLTtape IV and DLTtape VS1 cartridges had sales of $22.72 million. Quantum, HP, Sony, Maxell Imation and Fuji were the leading suppliers of these products.

DAT-72 was the largest DDS/DAT drive format in 2009 but posted a sharp decline in volume. DAT-160 gained traction during the year and supported media revenues. DDS/DAT drive sales amounted to $69.70 million representing 4.40% of the total backup technology market. Sales of DAT media came to $44.55 MM. The leading supplier was HP with 54.74% of the 5.702 million units sold. Sony, Imation and Maxell also maintained significant shares in the segment. DLT-V drive and media unit sales were both off. The drives had sales of $3.95 million in 2009.

The 8 mm technologies accounted for 3.90% of the total back-up technology market. AIT drive volumes were down sharply in 2009. Sales of AIT media contracted. They will continue to be available to support the drives which are now EOL. Tandberg’s 8 mm offerings are its VXA drives. Their sales were also down again in 2009. Total 8 mm media sales which are highly concentrated in AIT and AME products amounted to $41.17 million. Tandberg held a significant position in the media segment supplying cartridges compatible with its drives. Sony accounted for the vast majority of the sales of AIT media. It was the leading supplier in the total 8 mm media segment with a 72.05% share of the 1.088 million units sold.

QIC products represented 1.38% of total back-up technology revenue with sales of $21.90 million. Drives accounted for 18.40% and media 81.60%. The QIC market declined again in 2009. Tandberg was the sole supplier of 5 1/4” form-factor drives. Imation dominates the QIC cartridge media business. HP and Quantum were among the other vendors supplying this media.

Forecast
LTO drives have the most favorable outlook for hardware products over the forecast period. Their sales are expected to grow at a CAGR of 2.47% from 2009 to 2014. LTO cartridges have the most favorable outlook among media products with a CAGR of -2.21% leading to sales of $683.62 million in 2014.

Overland Storage Wins Storage Vendor of the Year

2010-06-02T10:24:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage a global provider of effortless data management and data protection solutions across the data lifecycle has won the ‘Storage Vendor of the Year’ category at the 2010 MicroScope ACEs channel award ceremony held at the Lancaster Hotel, London.

Congratulations to Overland for winning Storage Vendor of the Year at this year’s Microscope ACEs Awards. The awards are designed to recognize resellers, distributors and vendors who deliver excellence in IT products and services. HTML clipboardThis award reflects our commitment to the execution of our plan to deliver new technology to the market and to our channel partners who are remain loyal and committed in helping us take the Overland Storage brand to the next level.

Tandberg Data Entering Into LTO-5 HH Tape Drive

2010-04-13T15:41:00.000-07:00

Tandberg Data announced the availability of its new LTO-5 Half Height tape drives and media. Tandberg Data LTO-5 HH tape drives can backup 3TB (compression ratio of 2:1) of data on a single cartridge in less than three hours, reducing IT storage costs and simplifying data protection operations.

“The introduction of the LTO-5 HH tape drive allows customers to future-proof their storage needs while reducing the number of backup tapes required, lowering their total cost of data protection,” said Simon Anderson, business unit manager of tape automation, tape drives and media at Tandberg Data. “Customers who buy the Tandberg Data LTO-5 tape drive will see increases in performance and capacity, as well as improvements in operational efficiencies,” he added.

Over the last decade, storage capacities on LTO tape cartridges have steadily increased from 200GB to today’s 3TB on a single LTO-5 tape cartridge. This means that the entire printed contents of the U.S. Library of Congress could be stored on fewer than four LTO-5 cartridges. The entire 600TB of genealogical data listed on Ancestry.com, including the U.S. Census data from 1790 to 1930, could be stored on 200 LTO-5 tape cartridges. And a single LTO-5 tape cartridge could hold 3,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The Tandberg Data LTO-5 HH tape drive includes industry-standard AES 256-bit data encryption, ensuring that tapes can be safely and securely transported for offsite storage. The Tandberg Data LTO-5 HH tape drive is read and write compatible with LTO-4 media, and read compatible with LTO-3 media, providing investment protection and long-term archival benefits. Supplied initially with a SAS interface only, the Tandberg Data LTO-5 HH tape drive comes in internal, external or rackmount configurations.

Tandberg Data LTO-5 automation products are planned for release later in the second quarter of 2010. LTO-5 HH tape drives from Tandberg Data can store nearly two times more data than LTO-4 tape drives, making them ideal for automation customers.

"Customers require high-capacity, cost-effective tape storage solutions to safeguard and archive their critical data," said Robert Amatruda, research director, data protection and recovery, IDC. "Tandberg Data's LTO-5 HH tape drive offers customers significant capacity and performance improvements over previous generations of LTO tape drives."

More Tandberg Data LTO-5 HH Tape Drive Features

Enterprise-class features and performance in a small form factor
6Gb SAS or 8Gb Fibre Channel connectivity
LTO WORM (write once, read many) for regulatory compliance
Data rate matching reduces mechanical wear on the drive and extends tape life
MTBF of 250,000 hrs at 100% duty cycle increases reliability
Consumes 40 percent less power than previous LTO generations
New partitioning feature (available this summer) simplifies archiving and long-term storage
Well-defined six-generation LTO roadmap provides long-term data protection

Availability
Tandberg Data LTO-5 HH tape drives and LTO-5 media is now available through Tandberg Data’s established channel of distributor and reseller partners. LTO-5 tape drive pricing starts at a MSRP of $2,995 and LTO-5 media pricing starts at a MSRP of $129. All Tandberg Data LTO-5 HH tape drives come with a 3-year warranty and advanced replacement service.

Reliable, Scalable Data Storage For The Long Haul

2010-03-26T12:59:00.001-07:00

Finding a way to store data in a safe and accessible way has left many corporations perplexed. This is especially true as companies try to accommodate data growth, tight regulatory requirements, and distributed environments.

Overland Storage’s NEO E Series now take advantage of LTO-5 technology, the latest innovation in high-capacity storage. With LTO-5 technology, overall performance is doubled, and data throughput is increased by 20% when compared to LTO-4

The NEO E Series consists of the NEO 2000E, NEO 4000E, and NEO 8000 enterprise-level tape archive and storage library systems. The E Series offers between 45TB and 3PB of capacity, 30 to 1,000 cartridge slots, and one to 24 tape drives, and it is capable of data transfer rates up to 24TB/hour.

The NEO E Series features continuous operation, remote failover, and the ability to expand on demand. It also supports several connectivity options, including SCSI, iSCSI, and native Fibre Channel.

“The NEO E Series products offer the ultimate in cost of ownership by providing affordable high-capacity, high-performance data storage that provides reliable access to data with minimized management, maintenance, and service costs,” says Peri Grover, director of product management at Overland Storage.

“The NEO E Series products provide superior density with up to three times the capacity in the amount of physical space, which minimizes the use of costly data center space,” Grover says.

Additionally, NEO E Series products provide redundancy features, including redundant robotics, for environments that require scaled capacity and performance. They also offer twice the reliability of the competition, ensuring dependable access to mission-critical data, Grover says.

With the NEO Upgrade And Save Program, current NEO customers can upgrade their existing NEO systems and receive up to $12,000 in cash rebates.

TDK Starts Production of LTO Ultrium Generation-5 Media

2010-03-23T12:14:00.000-07:00

TDK completed development of the LTO Ultrium 5, the fifth-generation LTO (Linear Tape-Open) Ultrium format data cartridges and the cartridges recently passed certification testing by the LTO compliance verification entity (CVE). TDK has now started mass production of the LTO Ultrium 5 data cartridges.

TDK has long been an expert in the development of recording media and frequently works in close collaboration with various drive manufacturers during the initial tape and cartridge design stages to develop optimal products for each recording format. It was thanks to this extensive track record that the LTO Ultrium 5 passed the strict certification testing by the CVE.

The rapid development and expansion of digital networks resulting from the spread of cloud computing has caused the volume of data handled by data storage systems in large-scale data centers and other facilities to expand enormously, and even higher-capacity, faster data systems are needed. The LTO Ultrium 5 data cartridge, the fifth-generation LTO product, has a capacity of 1.5 TB (3.0 TB with 2:1 compression) and a high-speed data transfer rate of 140 MB/s (280 MB/s with 2:1 compression) maximum. LTO Ultrium 5 is an optimal data storage system for high-speed, high-capacity servers in today's era of large data volumes.

To achieve this data storage capacity, the LTO Ultrium 5 data cartridge, the recording media for LTO Ultrium 5 data storage systems, uses tape that is 12.65 mm wide and has 1,280 recording tracks (compared to 896 tracks for LTO Ultrium 4). In addition, the tape thickness has been reduced to make it possible for a single cartridge to hold more tape. As a result, the tape must meet even stricter precision, performance, and durability standards.

The LTO Ultrium 5 data cartridge, which TDK recently began mass-producing, incorporates cutting-edge magnetic material and tape technologies that TDK, a recording media manufacturer, has accumulated through the development of numerous magnetic recording media including LTO Ultrium products. The LTO Ultrium 5 format achieves stable read and write signals by using high-output, ultrafine metal particles designed specifically for LTO Ultrium, ultra-thin, dual-layer tape coating technology that controls the thickness of the magnetic layer on the nanometer order, and a special servo writer used to record high-precision servo signals.

In addition, a high-precision cartridge mechanism that seeks high-performance and high precision in every component including a high-precision leader pin and a reel hub that enhances the straightness of the drum is used to ensure precise drive access.

Thanks to these features and technologies, the LTO Ultrium 5 data cartridge is a highly durable, high-reliability data storage medium that meets today's most demanding needs for high capacity and high-speed storage solutions.

Overland Storage - SnapServer Will Move From Milpitas to San Jose

2010-03-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage, Inc. has completed plans for a July 2010 move from its Milpitas, California office to a new location in downtown San Jose, California. The newly designed offices in San Jose's Cityview Plaza Towers will accommodate current staff, centralizing the company's sales and marketing organizations, and provide room for expansion to keep pace with planned growth for the organization. Overland's new location offers a modern, open layout created to provide a working environment that fosters creativity and the open exchange of ideas among Overland employees and between Overland's staff and clients.

"Silicon Valley is widely recognized as a center of excellence for the high tech industry. We have carefully selected Overland's new location to take advantage of that reputation and provide our team a great work environment," said Eric Kelly, president and CEO of Overland Storage. "Employees will be within walking distance to countless restaurants, hotels and art and cultural venues. In addition, our team will have walking access to public transportation and new housing options, offering employees efficiencies in their work day travel by facilitating walking, biking and use of public transportation. We recognize that access to travel alternatives not only offers many benefits to our team, but to the community as well, by promoting less stress, cleaner air, reduced consumption of resources and less traffic congestion."

Jonathan Praw, vice president of BPG Properties, the group that owns Cityview Plaza, also pointed to the region's rich history as a high tech pioneer as the reason why companies find San Jose a great place to do business. "Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of high tech workers of any metropolitan area, and downtown San Jose has long been recognized as the Capital of Silicon Valley," said Praw. "As a recent winner of multiple awards recognizing excellence in facilities and building management, we are proud of Cityview Plaza and pleased that Overland Storage has chosen it for their new Silicon Valley location. With onsite retail services, high-end restaurants, a fitness facility and state of the art conference center, Cityview Plaza provides a premiere facility and ideal location for Overland and its employees."

With the announcement of Dr. Geoff Barrall as CTO and vice president of engineering earlier this month, the company will also be combining its product management and product development groups for disk-based data storage at the new location. This will allow Overland to enhance collaboration and accelerate the development of next generation storage technologies.

As part of his employment agreement, Dr. Barrall was granted an inducement stock option for the purchase of up to 218,356 shares of its common stock in accordance with NASDAQ Listing Rule 5635 (c)(4).

Overland's move to the Cityview Plaza Tower location will initially occupy 21,000 square feet of the 159,000 square foot 13-floor tower, with the option to occupy additional space as the company further expands its sales, marketing and engineering efforts. Overland will continue to operate out of its current Milpitas location until July 2010, after which its new Silicon Valley address will be: 125 South Market Street, San Jose, California 95113.

Vendor Metamorphosis, Or Resurrection?

2010-03-04T14:49:00.000-08:00

Back in July, I was skeptical that longtime tape automation vendors Tandberg Data and Overland Storage would successfully transit the tempest that is the SMB storage market in the recession. Both are announcing products and road maps that fit their SMB customers better, and Overland has both managed to raise another $12 million and hire Geoff Barrall to be their CTO, which could keep them around long enough to deliver on the vision. MAID pioneer Copan wasn't so lucky, however.

The core of Overland's vision is to make the transition from collecting 80 percent of revenue from HP's OEM tape automation sales to resurrecting the once incredibly valuable SnapServer brand. Their new CEO, Eric Kelly, has an attachment to Snap, having been part of the team that bought it from Quantum for $10 million and sold it to Adaptec for $100 million, now bringing it to Overland for $3 million. As often as Snap's been bought and sold, a guy could make a good living just being their investment banker. Kelly's made some good decisions at Overland, killing off their Ultamus SAN array being at the top of my list.

I had lunch with Eric and Overland's marketing and sales VP Jillian Mansolf a couple of weeks ago, and they get that the keys to the SMB market are making things easy to use and developing channel loyalty. This is, by the way, a model that the pre-Dell Equallogic executed very well.

Now they've added Barrall, who founded BlueArc, which makes high-speed NAS devices. Barrall also founded Data Robotics, which makes the Drobo NAS, and he developed the "Beyond RAID" technology that allows a NAS to use different sized disks in a RAID array. Barrall clearly understands how to make a successful NAS company, so I won't count Overland among the walking wounded just yet.

The new S2000 iSCSI array isn't just a re-package of the iSCSI target Snap servers have had for years. They've re-written both the iSCSI target to make it faster, and the user interface, replacing the web GUI with Windows plug-ins that greatly simplify provisioning. They've also added a vCenter plugin and high availability for VMware via replication and failover. With SAS and SATA options and expandability to 120TB via SAS JBODs, S2000 is competitive with other entry-level SAN arrays like HP's MSA and Dell Equallogic and is probably a step up form EMC's AX.

LTO-5 Tape Drives coming from Quantum and Overland Storage

2010-03-03T12:18:00.000-08:00

Both Quantum and Overland have announced LTO5 tape products, but the LTO consortium still has nowhere for tape users to go after LTO-6.

Linear Tape Open (LTO) 5 is the fifth LTO format and specifies cartridges holding 1.5TB of raw data with a 140MB/sec transfer rate. SpectraLogic was first to announce systems, in September last year but customers would actually get LTO-4 systems and a free upgrade when actual LTO-5 product was ready.

Overland Storage announced its NEO E LTO-5 tape automation product late in February. Now Quantum has followed suit, claiming it has "availability of the industry’s first tape products based on the generation 5 specifications" -meaning LTO-5 tape autoloaders, drives and media and limited availability of LTO-5 technology in its Scalar tape libraries as part of an early customer adoption program.

All three companies say LTO-5 product is needed according to Janae Lee, Quantum's SVP for marketing, because of "tremendous growth in unstructured data, rich file formats from new digital technologies and requirements to hold on to that content for longer periods". This is not going to stop, yet the LTO roadmap stops with the next LTO-6 generation, offering 3.2TB capacity and 270MB/sec transfer speed. After that there is a dead end.

There is a roadmap link on the LTO Ultrium web site but it takes you into a Page Not Found error - says it all really.

The members of the LTO consortium are HP, IBM and Quantum. Interestingly IBM and Fujitsu have devised technology they say could lead to a 35TB capacity tape. That indicates that the LTO consortium could go well beyond LTO-6 to generations 7, 8 and beyond, each one doubling the previous generation's capacity.

There is now no effective competition to the LTO formats in the general open systems server area, with Sony's AIT and Super AIT hors de combat and Quantum retiring its DLT formats in favour of LTO. This lack of competition could incline the LTO consortium to being slower than otherwise in deciding what to advise users to do once their LTO-6 tape drives don't have the capacity and speed needed to back up that "tremendous growth in unstructured data".

The lack of a roadmap might incline customers to look more favourably upon disk-to-disk (D2D) backup, especially deduplicating disk-to-disk backup. We can expect D2D arrays to be employing 4TB drives, possibly even 8TB ones, when LTO-6 tape drives appear in roughly three years time. Unless the LTO Consortium gets its ass in gear and presses its tape pedal to the metal, it could find that its lack of urgency will help bring about its own demise.

Perry Grover, product marketing director of Overland's tape storage division, said she could only speak as a customer of the LTO consortium, HP supplying the LTO drives Overland uses. She referenced the 35TB IBM and Fujitsu tape project and said: "I think investment in tape technology is continuing. I do believe the LTO Consortium is working on a roadmap post-LTO-6, and would expect to see that in the next few months."

An HP spokesperson said: "In response to extensive end user research, along with licensee and industry analyst input, the LTO Program has incrementally increased the data rate specification for generation 5, and plan to provide roadmap updates to LTO Ultrium generation 6 and beyond to give users improved tape performance attributes."

Overland Storage Signed for Private Placement

2010-02-25T11:31:00.000-08:00

Overland Storage, Inc, has signed definitive agreements for a private placement of 794,659 shares of Convertible Preferred Stock of the Company and Warrants to purchase up to 6,373,266 shares of Common Stock for a gross purchase price of approximately $12.0 million on February 18, 2010.

The Preferred Stock is initially convertible into 4,521,648 shares of Common Stock. The Warrants will have an initial exercise price of $2.583 per share which will expire February 22, 2015 and are exercisable in whole or in part, at any time prior to expiration. The transaction is anticipated to close on February 22, 2010 subject to customary closing conditions.

The Company intends to use the proceeds from the offering to fund product development, sales and marketing expansion and general working capital requirements. "We are extremely pleased to have completed this round of funding," said Eric Kelly, President and CEO of Overland Storage. "Having additional capital puts us in the position to execute on our vision and strategy, which is important to our partners, customers and employees."

OVERLAND STORAGE REPORTS FISCAL 2010 SECOND QUARTER RESULTS

2010-02-04T11:34:00.000-08:00

Overland Storage, Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL) today reported second quarter results for its fiscal quarter ended December 31, 2009.

The company reported revenues of $20.4 million for the fiscal 2010 second quarter compared to revenues of $19.3 million in the prior quarter and $28.9 million for the same quarter last year. Net loss decreased by 50.0% to $2.6 million for the fiscal 2010 second quarter, or $0.47 per share, compared with a $5.2 million loss or $1.21 per share for the same quarter last year. Additionally, net loss decreased by 29.7% from $3.7 million, or $0.87 per share, as compared to the prior quarter.
Highlights of product revenue for the December quarter were as follows:

• Overland Storage branded product revenues rose approximately 20% from our fiscal 2010 first quarter
• Revenue in our EMEA and APAC regions increased 52.1% and 33.8%, respectively, from our fiscal 2010 first quarter
• NEO tape library sales increased 28.8% from our the prior quarter, including strong unit sales of our NEO 8000 (which increased 75.0%)
• Our successful launch of NEOs in October, which broadens our NEO portfolio of products, resulted in an additional 16.7% growth in NEO branded product revenue from the prior quarter

The company reported a significant decrease, of 31.7% in operating expenses for our fiscal 2010 second quarter, to $8.6 million from $12.6 million in the same quarter last year. Operating expenses remained relatively flat compared to $8.4 million for the prior quarter. Overall decreases in operating expenses compared to the same quarter last year are primarily attributable to fiscal 2009 restructuring activities within sales and marketing and research and development. In addition, the company saw gains in gross margins of its overall business fueled by significant growth in its Overland Storage branded business. This growth, along with an expected decline in OEM revenue, resulted in an increase in the percentage of revenue from the Overland Storage branded business compared to total revenue. The company's gross margin was 28.5% in the fiscal 2010 second quarter, an increase from 26.7% in the same quarter last year and up from 27.0% in the prior quarter. This resulted, in part, from the growth of our branded business worldwide, driven by significant growth in the EMEA and APAC regions compared to prior quarter.

"It has been just under a year since we started on the path to rebuilding the company and its operations worldwide. We are pleased with what we have been able to achieve in this relatively short period of time,” said Eric Kelly, President and CEO of Overland Storage. “Our strategy to significantly increase branded product sales is being well executed. In addition, we are seeing many of the strategic initiatives that we have put in place begin to show results from expanded opportunities globally."

Cash as of December 30, 2009 was $5.7 million, an increase of 42.5% from $4.0 million as of September 30, 2009. During the second quarter the company raised $3.8 million of net proceeds through its public offering in exchange for the issuance of 2.1 million shares of common stock, received $2.0 million of proceeds from the liquidation of the ARS, and made $0.8 million in payments toward the retirement of its notes held by Adaptec and Anacomp. As of December 30, 2009, current liabilities associated with the company’s non-OEM accounts receivable financing arrangements, including interest remained materially consistent, at $4.4 million compared to September 30 and June 30, 2009.

Overland Storage also highlighted the momentum in its disk systems business during the fiscal 2010 second quarter, with unit sales of its multi-disk storage systems rising 32.7% over the previous quarter. These solutions have attracted a broad range of customers around the world -- from small business to leading brand name companies, governmental agencies and educational institutions-- with representation across a wide array of industries, including health care, large retail chains, technology, and consumer products.

Several competitive advantages should position the Company to capitalize on opportunities within disk-based data protection including, on a global scale, a strong sales and service infrastructure, a large installed base of tape automation customers that we can help to transition to disk backup and an industry-leading tape library portfolio leveraging the Company’s bundled disk-tape offerings.

CEO Eric Kelly Now Also President of Overland Storage

2010-01-11T11:37:00.000-08:00

Former president was Vernon LoForti who left the company last September.

On January 5, 2010, the Board of Directors of Overland Storage, upon the recommendation of the Nominating and Governance Committee of our Board of Directors, appointed Eric L. Kelly as President. Mr. Kelly will continue to serve as Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors. The board did not enter into or amend any plan, contract or arrangement between Overland and Mr. Kelly in connection with his appointment as our President.
Mr. Kelly, age 51, has served as Chief Executive Officer since January 2009 and a member of the Board of Directors since November 2007.

From April 2007 to January 2009, he served as president of Silicon Valley Management Partners, Inc., a management consulting and M&A advisory firm, which he co-founded in April 2007. From July 2004 to August 2006,

Mr. Kelly was Vice President and General Manager of storage systems solutions at Adaptec, Inc. From August 2002 to July 2004, he served as President and CEO of Snap Appliance, Inc., which was acquired by Adaptec. From March 2000 to June 2002, Mr. Kelly served as President, Network Systems Division of Maxtor Corporation. Prior to Maxtor, he served as the Chief Operating Officer of Isyndicate, Inc. From July 1998 to January 2000 he was the Enterprise Vice President for Dell Computer Corporation. From 1980 to 1998 he served in executive or managerial roles with Netpower Incorporated, Diamond Multimedia Systems Incorporated, Conner Peripherals Incorporated, Marq Technologies Incorporated and IBM.

Grand Valley State University Graduates to First-Class Data Protection with Overland Storage’s SAN, Backup Appliance and Tape Solutions

2010-01-07T15:29:00.000-08:00

University Leverages Overland’s Price, Capacity and Performance Benefits to Bolster Backup and Recovery while Elevating Data Protection of Rapidly Growing VMware Environment

Overland Storage, Inc. today announced that Grand Valley State University has deployed an economical multi-tiered data protection strategy utilizing Overland’s ULTAMUS™ RAID high-density SAN storage, REO SERIES® disk-based backup and recovery appliances as well as NEO SERIES® tape libraries. The integrated, scalable platform seamlessly safeguards 10 TBs of mission-critical data while enabling the university to better support a rapidly expanding VMware virtualization environment.

Grand Valley State is a public, four-year college located in Allendale, Michigan. Situated near Grand Rapids, the university supports more than 24,000 students along with a faculty and support staff of almost 2,000 people. The Princeton Review named GVSU one of the best universities in the Midwest in 2009 and its Seidman College of Business is known as one of the country’s top business schools.

An IT team of 40 ensures that students and faculty have ubiquitous network access and the latest tools to enrich the educational process, including SunGard’s Banner Unified Digital Campus administrative software. The technology staff also oversees 250 Microsoft Windows file servers, nearly 100 VMware virtual servers and 10 TBs of vital data. A constant influx of data along with a steady migration to server virtualization strained the university’s tape-based backup infrastructure, prompting Grand Valley to explore the addition of a cost-effective yet powerful disk-based appliance to bolster data protection.

In seeking reliable, scalable backup and recovery products to support its rapidly expanding environment, Grand Valley turned to trusted reseller partner, Mercury Storage, a Southfield, Michigan-based provider of best-of-breed data storage and security solutions. After evaluating products from several leading manufacturers, the university selected a suite of end-to-end data protection solutions from Overland Storage, including its high-capacity ULTAMUS RAID 1200 storage arrays, top-of-the-line REO 9100c disk-based backup appliances with hardware compression and enterprise-class NEO 8000 tape libraries. Together, this complementary blend of products has enabled Grand Valley State to accelerate backups and restores, extend long-term data retention and achieve heightened levels of disaster recovery and business continuity.

“With Overland’s SAN products, back up appliances and tape solutions, I no longer worry about backups or keeping up with spikes in data growth,” said David Reed, network engineer for Grand Valley State University. “When our continued growth requires additional solutions, we’ll look at Overland first because we’ve come to trust their products over the years since they’ve always performed well and we’re confident the next one will too.”

Grand Valley first took advantage of two NEO 8000 tape libraries for enterprise-class performance and capacity with access to as much as 1.6 petabytes of storage and space for up to 1,000 cartridges and 24 tape drives. Next, the university opted for a pair of high-end REO 9100 disk-based backup appliances to accelerate backups by more than 75 percent while enabling near-instantaneous data recoveries.

The team then added compression cards to their high-end REOs to nearly double the useable virtual tape capacity in order to keep pace with constant data growth. Two ULTAMUS SAN storage solutions complete the data protection picture by offering massive amounts of storage at the best possible price point to accommodate the university’s VMware backups. “

According to Jillian Mansolf, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for Overland Storage, the company’s family of backup appliances, highly available SAN and NAS solutions and tape products scale easily to support demanding requirements. “Our future-proof data protection solutions are flexible and well suited for rapid-growth environments,” she explains. “Grand Valley State University is an excellent example of how Overland’s product portfolio delivers complementary capabilities for achieving faster backups and restores, more reliable long-term data retention and increased support for server virtualization migrations.”

Iomega StorCenter NAS is great for backups

2009-11-05T11:47:00.000-08:00

You can never be rich enough or thin enough, and you can never have enough storage.

I’ve been playing with Iomega’s brand new StorCenter ix2-200, a 4TB network-attached storage/home server that totally kicks NAS!

Not only is it a nice big target for Time Machine backups, it’s also an iTunes server. It plays nice with the Mac, and is dead easy to set up and use.

Aimed at small business and home users, Iomega’s StorCenter ix2-200 offers cheap network storage AND a media server. It’s a killer combo: you get a big roomy drive for Time Machine and a no-setup server for storing gobs of music and movies. Your media is accessible by any Mac or PC on your home network — as well as the Apple TV and the kids’ Xbox. Your files are also accessible over the internet.

Best yet, it’s a torrent machine, able to download and store torrents in the background. You just double-click on the torrent jobs you want downloading, and the ix2-200 does the rest. It’s fast and doesn’t clog your internet connection like a lot of Mac clients. Plus you don’t have to leave your machine on while you wait for the torrents to finish downloading. There’s also a built-in video player so you can watch downloaded torrents through the ix2’s browser interface. It plays video encoded in popular formats like .avi and divx, so no need to download VLC or Perian.

The ix2-200 is available in 1TB to 4TB capacities. Starting at $270 for the 1TB model, it costs $370 for the 2TB version and $700 for the 4TB version (two 2TB drives are still pretty expensive). That might sound pricey, but a comparable Hewlett Packard MediaSmart Home Server also costs $700 but offers only 1.5TB of storage. Yeah, the HP offers more performance, but it’s probably overkill in a typical home setting. According to Iomega, the ix2-200 can serve five simultaneous HD video streams at the same time, and support about 20 users at the same time.

It serves up media not just to Macs, Windows and Linux PCs, but UPnP devices like networked TVs and game consoles, including the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It’s preconfigured to share through iTunes and automatically shows up in iTunes as a shared device.

Setup was a breeze. I plugged it into the wall and home/office router, then ran the setup utility on my Mac. A few clicks later, and there it was in the Finder as a shared drive. Open Time Machine, and it’s available for backups. Dead easy. Another NAS appliance I’m reviewing wasn’t nearly as easy to set up..

The ix2-200 is configured through a browser interface, which is very intuitive (also unlike the other NAS appliance). Easy to add users, shared folders, set storage quotas and setup an FTP server.

The only problem I’ve had is with the browser interface, which is a little glitchy. Sometimes it jumps to a “configure network settings” screen, which disappears if you hit the Home link. It’s annoying, but not a deal breaker.

It’s got a gigabit connection and two drive bays. Drives are user replaceable, and it’s easy to add extra storage — just plug external drives into the three USB ports (one in front; two in the back).

Iomega says the ix2-200 is pretty green. It uses new green drives and automatically spins them down when not in use.

It also supports Bluetooth for backup and storage for smartphones, but alas not the iPhone until Apple adds for support for Bluetooth file sharing. It will work with jailbroken iPhones though. Requires a separate Bluetooth adapter (price TBD).

There’s a front panel “quick transfer” button for automatically copying files to and from USB thumb drives, flash memory cards and external USB drives. It can also initiate pre-set network copy jobs, which is useful for things like offsite backups.

There’s a bunch of other features for business users I’ll likely never use — like iSCSI for fast data transfers and support for up to five networked security cams.

But that’s all good. The iX2-200 is a great, full-featured package that’s not just a dumb hard drive but a capable addition to any home or office network. Recommended.

Overland Storage Launches NEO 200s and NEO 400s Autoloaders

2009-11-05T11:21:00.000-08:00

Small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) face some tough choices right now. Disk-based backup is definitely on the rise and has many appealing features, but it can come with a price tag that these organizations simply cannot afford and may not meet all levels of data protection needs. Many SMEs are using tape as a primary backup target or leveraging tape as an archive in a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) scenario. It is these requirements that the new NEO® 200s and NEO® 400s entry-level tape libraries announced this week from Overland Storage are designed to address.

There is no doubt that the price of disk-based backup has dropped dramatically over the last few years, even as its acceptance as a backup target has risen. But in small IT shops, tape still has appeal. It is portable, available in a small form factors and its upfront and ongoing costs are minimal, especially if needed to back up only a few hundred gigabytes (GBs) or up to one terabyte (TB) nightly. It is for reasons like these IT offices with budget, space and resource constraints are still purchasing entry-level tape libraries.

But as they look for new entry-level options, their appetite for more capacity and more features is increasing. Growing data centers and few or no IT personnel to manage backups means that hardware and software features once only found in midrange and enterprise tape libraries need to find their way into entry-level tape libraries.

To satisfy this growing hunger, Overland elected to leverage its proven NEO tape library family with the addition of an entry-level offering. The NEO 200s and NEO 400s entry-level tape libraries are the first products in this new line. While they do not possess all the features one will find in the NEOe product line, end users find the following features appealing for backup and archive applications:

* Web-based remote management and diagnostics
* Integrated bar code readers
* Choice of SCSI, SAS or native FC interfaces
* Easy rack installation
* Removable magazines with user-configurable mail slots

Of these features, Overland's decision to continue to support SCSI is notable because many of its competitors are moving to entry level tape libraries that only offer SAS or FC. While SAS interfaces certainly appear to the be wave of the future and are supported on these new Overland systems, continuing to offer a SCSI interface option still makes sense for SMEs since for now SCSI is still more prevalent and standardized than SAS and can provide sufficient throughput for smaller environments.

The NEO 200s and NEO 400s also diverge in a number of ways. The NEO 400s is a larger capacity, more full featured tape library while the NEO 200s more cleanly fits the definition of an autoloader/small library. Some other ways in which the NEO 200S and NEO 400s differ include:

* The NEO 200s supports both LTO-3 and LTO-4 tape drives while the NEO 400s only supports LTO-4 tape drives. Smaller organizations are less likely to have a need for the higher capacities and faster throughput that LTO-4 tape offers plus LTO-3 tapes are, on a per cartridge basis, lower cost than LTO-4 tapes.
* Redundant power supply option on the NEO400s. Overland has learned over the years that SMEs and data-intensive environments have a heightened need for data availability. The ability to add redundant power ensures a "backup" power source and ongoing access to data in the event of a primary power supply failure.
* Planned future options for the NEO 400s. For organizations faced with rapidly changing environments requiring an extra degree of flexibility, Overland is planning to provide a scalability solution that allows them to start with a NEO 400s with 48 slots and add capacity at a later date as needed. An encryption option also is planned to accommodate additional data security and compliance requirements.

Overland Storage Appoints Christopher Gopal Vice President of Worldwide Operations

2009-09-09T12:45:00.000-07:00

Industry Thought Leader Joins Executive Team to Align Strategic Supply Chain Model with Operational Best Practices for Optimal Customer Satisfaction & Shareholder Value

Overland Storage, Inc. today announced the appointment of Christopher Gopal as vice president of worldwide operations. In this capacity, Gopal will oversee Overland’s global supply chain and operations strategies encompassing product sourcing, manufacturing, inventory, logistics, fulfillment and demand/supply management.

“We are extremely pleased to welcome Chris to our executive team as the head of operations,” says Eric Kelly, chief executive officer of Overland Storage. “Chris is a well-known industry expert with a stellar track record in executing successful supply chain models with world-class results and increased shareholder value. We are confident he’ll play a pivotal part in helping Overland achieve greater operating efficiencies while enabling us to facilitate rapid product development at lower costs to meet market demands and drive business success for our global channel partners.”

Gopal brings nearly 35 years of experience in leading, managing and transforming all aspects of supply chain, operations and product development in an impressive career that spans both prominent global organizations and entrepreneurial start-ups in the technology and telecommunications industries. Previously, he was COO for Applied Solar, Inc., a next-generation solar energy company based in San Diego. He also served as vice president of worldwide operations at Dell, where he helped develop and implement the company’s supply-chain model and operations strategy.

Additionally, Gopal served as senior partner and director of Ernst & Young’s Global Supply Chain & Operations Consulting Services and has held executive positions at SAIC and Unisys. A well-respected authority on supply chain management and global operations, he speaks frequently at industry events and has co-authored three books, including “Supercharging Supply Chains: New Ways to Increase Value through Global Operational Excellence.”

“I look forward to working with Overland’s customers and suppliers to achieve operational excellence and global supply chain success,” said Gopal. “My background, previous experiences and hands-on approach will prove invaluable as we elevate Overland’s operations and build value while reducing costs through integrated demand/supply management.”

Gopal holds a Ph.D. in Business from the University of Southern California and an MBA from the Cranfield School of Management, UK.

Jillian Mansolf at Overland Storage recognized as one of the top 100 women in the channel

2009-08-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

SAN DIEGO - August 26, 2009 - Overland Storage, Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL) today announced that Jillian Mansolf, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing, has been recognized by Everything Channel’s CRN Magazine as one of the Top 100 Women in the Channel. The Top 100 Women in the Channel were chosen by the editors of the magazine based on the women’s achievements as executives and the amount of influence they wield over the technology channel. The Top 100 Women in the Channel represent a changing trend in what traditionally has been an all-male industry.

“We are very pleased to see women executives reaching the highest levels in a wide range of dynamic companies. It is with great pleasure that we honor the women who have made a profound impact in the technology marketplace,” said Robert C. DeMarzo, senior vice president and editorial director, Everything Channel. “We offer our congratulations to Jillian Mansolf for her significant contributions to our industry."

For the past 13 years, Mansolf has leveraged her significant channel sales and marketing expertise to execute highly successful global channel programs for a variety of high-technology organizations. Most recently, she joined Overland to lead the company’s sales organization and expand its strategic marketing efforts worldwide. Overland continually reinforces its channel commitment through the ongoing development of customer-centric resource and lead-generation programs designed to help its channel partners accelerate sales cycles while driving increased revenue and profitability.

“It’s an honor to join this group of inspirational leaders who are being recognized for making an indelible mark on the channel,” said Mansolf. “At Overland, our unwavering’ dedication to building and sustaining long-term channel relationships is reinforced by a constant focus on providing innovative products, sales tools, training and the educational resources our partners need to address their customers’ ever-increasing business requirements.”

Overland Storage appoints new VP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing

2009-08-12T12:01:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage, Inc. today announced the appointment of Jillian Mansolf as vice president of worldwide sales and marketing. In this position, Mansolf will leverage her extensive sales and channel marketing experience to lead the company's global sales and marketing teams.

“We are extremely pleased to welcome Jillian to our executive team as the head of worldwide sales and marketing,” said Eric Kelly, chief executive officer of Overland Storage. “Jillian is a storage industry veteran with a strong track record of success, including her tenure as an officer and executive at Snap Appliance. Her unique industry perspective as well as significant sales and marketing expertise will prove instrumental in leading the Overland sales organization while broadening our strategic marketing efforts worldwide.”

Previously, Mansolf served as senior vice president of sales and marketing at Data Robotics, where she spearheaded the company's global sales and marketing initiatives. Prior to that, she held various executive positions at Motion Computing, Maxtor and Dell. At Snap Appliance, Mansolf played a pivotal role in doubling sales and establishing the company as the worldwide NAS volume market leader.

Ravi Pendekanti will take on a new role as vice president of business development and solutions. This executive position, which reports to Kelly, reflects the importance of integrated solutions as a major growth driver in Overland's business. “Our strengthened executive team is well positioned to accelerate growth across all major lines of business and geographic areas,” added Kelly. “This will ensure Overland continually delivers compelling end-to-end solutions that effectively meet our customeers' requirements.”

Overland Storage Inks Strategic Disbribution Agreement with Synnex

2009-06-17T11:25:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage, Inc. today announced that SYNNEX Corporation, a leading business process services company, has been named a new Overland North American distribution partner. Under the terms of the strategic distribution agreement, SYNNEX will add Overland’s complete line of storage and data protection appliances to the suite of solutions that SYNNEX already offers to its more than 15,000 resellers.

The agreement reinforces Overland’s continued channel commitment while complementing the company’s focus on bringing enterprise-class capabilities to mid-range customers through affordable and reliable products that reduce backup windows, accelerate recoveries, streamline data retention and facilitate cost-effective disaster recovery. Additionally, the partnership with SYNNEX will provide added benefits for Overland channel partners seeking innovative disk-based backup and recovery, tape automation as well as SAN and NAS data protection appliances.

According to Ravi Pendekanti, vice president of worldwide marketing for Overland Storage, the distribution agreement with SYNNEX will broaden the reach of Overland’s products while providing channel partners with strong technical expertise and support. “Overland is extremely pleased to partner with SYNNEX to help its vast community of resellers solve
ever-increasing data protection problems,” he says. “Together, we can offer a diverse portfolio of solutions backed by the right level of technical support and responsive service to ensure the availability and accessibility of business-critical data.”

SYNNEX will distribute Overland’s complete product line, including REO SERIES® disk-based backup and recovery, NEO SERIES® and ARCvault™ award-winning tape automation, ULTAMUS™ RAID high-performance SAN and Snap
Server® NAS-based data protection appliances.

"Overland Storage is a well-recognized name in the storage industry, with a reputation for developing affordable, reliable, cost competitive products tailored for small, midrange and distributed enterprises," says Bob Stegner, senior vice president of marketing, North America, for SYNNEX Corporation. "We are very selective in determining which technologies are added to our arsenal of products and are delighted to give our resellers the opportunity to choose Overland for their customers’ data protection needs."

EMC vs NetApp - Bidding war for Data Domain, Inc.

2009-06-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

Storage administrators are keeping a close eye on EMC Corp.'s and NetApp's bidding war for Data Domain Inc. and wondering how the fate of the data deduplication backup specialist will impact their shops and the storage industry in general.

While customers generally see Data Domain fitting better with NetApp than EMC, they are nervous about the competitive aspects of the industry's consolidation. Nasser Mirzai, vice president of technology at San Mateo, Calif.-based TradeBeam Inc., has products from EMC, NetApp and Data Domain. He pointed out that Data Domain's product line is more similar to NetApp's than EMC's. NetApp and Data Domain have core software they use across different hardware designs suited to different sized businesses. EMC is also perceived as more of a large enterprise company, according to Mirzai, while NetApp and Data Domain have broader appeal to midrange organizations.

"I think NetApp could keep the same energy and momentum and bring that concept to its full potential of taking a similar approach across different sizes of product," he said. "If the perception is that this is a big monster EMC product and users can't afford it, it may slow down growth and impact adoption [of Data Domain devices]."

Mirzai also said EMC has more potential conflicts of interest with Data Domain customers because of its broad product portfolio. EMC CEO Joe Tucci has already pledged that his company will cooperate with all backup software vendors if it acquires Data Domain, but Mirzai isn't sure.

"What if this means that [EMC] NetWorker support for Data Domain would be better going forward than, say, [Symantec Corp.'s] Backup Exec?" he asked. Added Mirzai: "Data Domain management has already accepted the NetApp offer. I think NetApp has a stronger chance. Then again, money talks."

Storage administrators also suspect gamesmanship in EMC's tender offer to Data Domain shareholders rather than genuine plans for the company's data deduplication backup technology. "I don't think that they [EMC] are really interested in Data Domain," said NetApp customer Reinoud Reynders, IT manager at the University Hospitals Leuven in Belgium. "NetApp has a real advantage in dedupe of online storage." That said, Reynders said he doesn't expect NetApp to break the bank for Data Domain. "I'm very confident that the board of NetApp will only buy it for a fair price," he said.

Even some EMC customers said they worry about the competitive implications of EMC cornering the market on data deduplication with IP from both Avamar Technologies Inc. (which EMC acquired in 2006) and Data Domain. Sean O'Mahoney, vice president and senior manager of technology services at Republic Bank in Louisville, Ky., considered Data Domain but picked EMC's Avamar, NetWorker and DL3D virtual tape library (VTL) based on a partnership with Quantum Corp.

"Data Domain did have some features we liked – it would be positive for us if EMC picks it up," O'Mahoney said. "But if NetApp gets Data Domain, the consumer wins as it's a more competitive environment."

Another EMC customer, David Grant, data center manager at Kanata, Ontario-based Mitel Networks Corp., wrote in an email to SearchStorage.com, "If I had my 'druthers' I think that I'd rather see the young guy win…I have less trust in EMC's intentions, or in [its] ability to successfully add in Data Domain's technology to their existing product lines without losing something along the way. EMC [is] maybe just too big and set in [its] ways for me to feel good about [it] being the winning bidder here."

Not every EMC customer feels that way, however. "Obviously, with our investment in mostly EMC equipment and being a Data Domain customer, it probably makes better business sense for us [for EMC to win]," said Michael Passe, storage architect at Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. "Generally, EMC doesn't have the strictly à la carte pricing model that NetApp follows on its NAS [network-attached storage] equipment."

But some NetApp customers find the consolidation just as worrying no matter who wins. Jim Krochmal, manager of IT at cement plant designer Polysius in Atlanta, wrote in an email to SearchStorage.com, "I prefer NetApp so I can stay in the same 'product family.' It just seems we have to declare allegiance to 'corporate families/gangs/partners' these days," he wrote. "[That means] fewer choices and less compatibility at full functionality."

Added Stan Horowitz, data management engineer at Philadelphia-based Temple University, "My concern is that the playing field in the area of data deduplication will be narrowed because both NetApp and EMC already offer competing solutions to what Data Domain offers."

Who will win the EMC, NetApp bidding war for Data Domain?

While customers consider how Data Domain's acquisition will affect them, industry analysts are debating who will win EMC Corp.'s and NetApp's bidding war for Data Domain Inc.

"Here is how this plays out," said Brian Babineau, a senior analyst at Milford, Mass.-based Enterprise Strategy Group. "NetApp counters with a richer offer, and EMC doesn't because it was just doing this to raise the price and they bow out." After a year or so spent squarely in the sights of EMC in a bitterly competitive market, Babineau said he doubts Data Domain employees would want to be integrated into EMC. "They are OK with NetApp," he said.

Backup expert W. Curtis Preston is just as certain EMC will prevail, writing in his blog, "There's no way NetApp's going to outbid EMC here. Everyone already thought that [$]1.5 [billion] was too much for NetApp to pay, given their track record with acquisitions. How are they going to outbid a [$]1.8 ALL CASH bid? …Methinks they're back to square one."

One customer who uses EMC and NetApp has a good idea who the ultimate winner will be.

"More than likely, the only clear winners will be the lawyers," said Tom Becchetti, who works with a Fortune 200 company that he requested not be identified because of corporate policy forbidding him to use its name publicly. "Data Domain stockholders won't be doing bad either."

EPA begins long process to green storage specification

2009-05-13T15:30:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is looking to develop standards for making data storage devices more energy efficient, although it's probably years away from having an industry-standard green storage specification.

The EPA issued an industry letter indicating that it's taking formal steps to develop an Energy Star specification for enterprise data storage devices. Meeting the voluntary Energy Star spec would allow data storage equipment manufacturers to use the familiar Energy Star marketing label to promote product energy efficiencies. The EPA already has a similar Energy Star program for computer servers, and the server specification is expected this week.

There's a lot of talk about green storage from vendors, but customers have no formal way of comparing products to determine their power efficiency.

Andrew Fanara, program manager for the EPA's Climate Protection Partnership Division, said the agency wants to develop more standardized information to measure the energy consumption of data center products.

"The long-term Holy Grail, if there is one, is to be able to measure how efficient systems are when they're actually doing computing," Fanara said, "and then presenting that information to users and buyers in an industry-standard format."

No deadline has been set for establishing the green storage specification. Fanara said the process could take anywhere from six months to three years, depending on technical issues, industry interest and manufacturer support. Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst at Stillwater, Minn.-based StorageIO Group, said he expects the initial specification in 18 months to two years.

Challenges to data storage industry agreement
Schulz said the EPA's biggest challenge will be getting the data storage industry to agree on an initial specification and a roadmap for future green storage specifications. "In some ways, the EPA is tasked with herding cats," he said.

The specification is a blueprint that will define the energy guidelines enterprise data storage devices must meet to participate in the Energy Star program, Fanara said. Once a product meets the specification guidelines, manufacturers can voluntarily submit the product information to the EPA and the product will be added to a data storage equipment Energy Star-compliant list.

Schulz said the specification's applicability to storage users' real-world needs will be the key to its success. "The program's metrics have to be of benefit for the IT organization," Schulz said. "Otherwise, it's just an interesting exercise."

Schulz believes the initial green storage specification should focus on the amount of energy a storage device uses while working, as opposed to the device's energy use while idle.

"With the focus on efficiency optimization, boosting productivity and business economic sustainability, the issue then becomes how efficient the device is while doing work," he said.

Framework for testing and performance
Fanara said he expects the EPA to issue a framework document within 60 days, prepared by the EPA Energy Star technical staff in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Energy. Energy Star staff will also gather input from data storage devices users, buyers and component suppliers. The framework will identify initial testing procedures, and the performance and features organizations typically look for when buying data storage.

The framework will be released to the industry for comments and feedback on identifying barriers to energy efficiencies and standardized product information.

Battling to make data centers green
Fanara said the green storage specification is part of the EPA's concentration on increasing data center energy efficiency.

He said the agency has "identified data centers as an important growing source of energy consumption, especially given its unique position as a critical component of our country's computing backbone."

The Energy Star program is developing a data center and office building benchmarking program that will rate a building's energy efficiency from one to 100. So far, the agency has benchmarked close to 100,000 office buildings nationwide, Fanara said.

To help storage managers identify and evaluate data center energy-efficiency opportunities, the U.S. Department of Energy offers the Data Center Energy Profiler (DC Pro) software tool suite, which includes two free software tools for data center managers. The DC Pro Profiling Tool diagnoses how energy is used in a data center, and provides ways to save energy and money. The DC Pro Assessment Tools conduct a more accurate assessment of data center energy-efficiency opportunities for each major data center system.

Overland Storage Reports Fiscal 2009 3rd Quarter Results

2009-05-05T10:22:00.000-07:00

SAN DIEGO – May 4, 2009 – Overland Storage, Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL) today reported results for its fiscal 2009 third quarter and nine-month period ended March 31, 2009.

Net revenue for the fiscal 2009 third quarter was $22.3 million, compared with $31.8 million for the same quarter a year ago. The company reported a net loss of $3.3 million, or $0.26 per share, for the fiscal 2009 third quarter compared with a net loss of $4.9 million, or $0.39 per share, for the same quarter in the prior fiscal year.

For the first nine months of fiscal 2009, the company reported net revenue of $83.5 million, compared with $98.8 million for the same period in the prior fiscal year. The net loss for the first nine months of fiscal 2009 was $15.4 million, or $1.20 per share, compared with a net loss of $16.0 million, or $1.25 per share, in the first nine months of fiscal 2008.

The company noted that net revenue for the fiscal 2009 third quarter decreased 29.9 percent from the fiscal 2008 third quarter due to lower sales in both the OEM and branded channels, reflecting economic pullbacks by customers consistent with the industry sector overall. Total OEM revenue was down 49.8 percent compared to the fiscal 2008 third quarter. This trend continues to reflect the previously announced transition by the company’s largest OEM customer to a new product from an alternate supplier. Total branded revenue declined 17.2 percent compared to branded revenue in the third quarter of fiscal 2008. Sales in the Americas region were down 23.7 percent compared to the prior year third quarter and EMEA was down 30.9 percent. The APAC region, which represents a smaller overall percentage of sales, was down 42.6 percent. Partially offsetting these declines was an increase of 11.6 percent in revenue from the sales of services and spares.

Although revenue in the fiscal 2009 third quarter declined 29.9 percent from the fiscal 2008 third quarter, the gross profit of $6.3 million in the fiscal 2009 third quarter represents only a 18.2 percent drop from the $7.7 million in gross profit reported in the prior year quarter. The gross profit margin of 28.5 percent for the fiscal 2009 third quarter improved significantly over the fiscal 2008 third quarter margin of 24.2 percent.

Operating expenses of $9.6 million in the fiscal 2009 third quarter declined 22.6 percent, from $12.4 million in the fiscal 2008 third quarter, reflecting ongoing restructuring in response to revenue levels and current economic conditions. Compared to the fiscal 2008 third quarter, sales and marketing expenses declined 33.8 percent while R&D expenses declined 15.0 percent.

The total cash balance at the end of the quarter was $3.8 million, an increase of $0.8 million, from the end of the fiscal 2009 second quarter. Combined short-term and long-term debt increased $3.8 million during the fiscal 2009 third quarter, consisting of $1.5 million in additional borrowing under the Marquette financing agreement as well as a new $2.3 million secured promissory note from the company’s primary on-site service provider, which represents a conversion of amounts formerly included in accounts payable.

“Absent other dynamics, our March quarter is typically weaker than our Decemberquarter,” noted Eric Kelly, CEO of Overland Storage, Inc. “This year, global economic conditions that affected most technology companies exacerbated the seasonal weakness and resulted in lower than expected sales in both the company’s OEM and branded channels across all geographic regions.

“Our current focus at Overland is three-fold: (1) strengthening our balance sheet, (2) improving our business model and (3) delivering comprehensive solutions to address our customers’ requirements. We have made significant progress in each of these areas. At the end of March, we announced a $5 million international accounts receivable financing agreement with FGI Finance. This agreement complements the existing $9 million domestic receivable financing already in place with Marquette Commercial Finance. Additionally, we have implemented a number of changes to our business model, both internally and in conjunction with our strategic partners, which are resulting in better cash utilization and improvements to many of our key business metrics. Internally, we evaluated our team in terms of expertise and geographic location and are making adjustments to better position ourselves to execute efficiently in each discipline.

“Lastly, we have put substantial effort into our roadmap and expect to introduce a number of new, compelling solutions in the coming months,” concluded Kelly. “We firmly believe that healthy global demand exists and will continue to exist for mid-range storage, data protection and business continuity offerings that distinctively address our customers’ requirements.”

Netgear ReadyNAS Pro tops the list - CRN Test

2009-04-17T13:47:00.000-07:00

Storage continues to be a strong growth area of information technology, and small and midsize businesses continue to be a key area of focus for vendors and solution providers alike.

So this month in our Bake-Off comparative review, we take a new look at four storage solutions that are actively sold to, and deployed in, SMB enterprises—storage that can be versatile and robust enough to meet different business needs while not requiring enterprise levels of budgeting.

Even though all the contenders fit the general category as we intended, they were anything but similar. And while there could be some crossover in the way they are used, each specializes in fulfilling a specific need.

For the purpose of this comparative review, the CRN Test Center set up each device on a subnet in our lab and used the same PC to copy files across the network, to and from the storage unit being tested. We also evaluated each unit based on its ease of setup, configuration and administration, as well as feature set and price.

Netgear ReadyNAS Pro

Network attached storage (NAS) devices started out as a relatively simple way for an enterprise to add additional shared storage space to its network. Over the past few years, though, these appliances have been shrinking in both size and price, allowing the SMB and SOHO markets to take advantage of their features. There are even a few models that target the rising home network and media center users. With the acquisition of Infrant Technologies last year, Netgear also obtained its rather successful ReadyNAS line. The popular ReadyNAS NAV+ was a second-place finisher in our NAS Bake-Off last year.

Aiming to improve, Netgear released the new six-bay, ReadyNAS Pro and the CRN Test Center found it to be a worthy addition to the line. Currently available in three Business Edition configurations—1.5 TB, 3 TB and 6 TB—our evaluation unit was model RNDP6350, which came loaded with three 500-GB hard drives. There is also a Pioneer Edition that is diskless. All the drives are hot-swappable and, with current drive capacities reaching 1.5 GB, the ReadyNAS Pro can now support up to 9 TB total.

Looking like a big brother to the four-bay NAV+ model, the ReadyNAS Pro measures 10 by 6.7 by 11.2 inches and weighs in at 16.5 pounds (without hard drives). Similar to many of today's computer cases, it has a slick, black finish and a mesh grill on the front. Running along the top edge of the front door is an easy-to-read, blue OLED display. A power switch, backup button and USB port round out the front-panel controls. By default, pressing the button will back up the "backup" share on the NAS to an external storage device plugged into the USB port below it. Rear connections include two additional USB ports, as well as two RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet jacks.

Via the administrator console, the network connections can be configured for teaming and failover, with various bonding options, including load balancing. This allows for the combining of NICs to one IP to pool banwidth and failover from one to the other if one should stop working.

The ReadyNAS Pro supports RAID 0, 1, 5 and 6 as well as its own X-RAID2 (Expandable) configuration. Built-in streaming services include SqueezeCenter, iTunes, UPnP AV and Home Media, and there is also a print queue service for a USB printer.

During our tests, setting up the device was simple. After connecting to the network and powering it on, we installed the included RAIDar software, whose wizard scanned the network for attached NASes and walked us through the initial, browser-based configuration (we did, however, receive an invalid security certificate warning that had to be cleared before being allowed to continue).

As was the case with previous ReadyNAS units, reviewers found the administrator console intuitive. Shares are easily created or deleted and the same holds true for users and groups, who can also have quotas set against their accounts. Supported protocols are CIFS (SMB), NFS, AFP, FTP, HTTP/S and RSync, and each share can be customized to individually use specific protocols. In addition, shares can be configured on USB storage devices.

Recent firmware upgrades to the ReadyNAS have added iSCSI functionality and integration of the newly launched ReadyNAS Vault (powered by elephantdrive), an enterprise-class, Web-based storage service for online disaster recovery that is also managed via an Internet browser.

To measure speed, two directories with various file types were copied from the testing PC to the device and back again. The first, a 1.2-GB directory, contained 23 files and the second, a 3.2-GB directory, had 41.

Writing to the device, the 1.2-GB folder took 19 seconds and the 3.2-GB folder took 3 minutes, 4 seconds, while reading from it took 27 seconds, and 3 minutes, 10 seconds respectively. Based on Netgear's data, as well as some beta testers across the Web, the unit has been measured to reach more than 100 MBps. We're willing to concede that our local machine was probably a bottleneck in the testing and, depending on the setup, realistic speeds will probably fall somewhere in between.

Loaded with scores of other features, the ReadyNAS Pro is many things rolled into one chassis. It is an extremely powerful, relatively small device that can dynamically grow, along with the company that uses it. With prices ranging from $2,000 to $4,100, it costs more than other, comparable products, but its feature set and solid performance make it worthy of consideration.

D-Link DSN-1100-10 xStack

While a NAS is typically used to access files and, therefore, functions best when used for file serving and sharing, storage area networks (SANs) were developed with disk utilization and performance in mind. Using the SCSI protocol (as opposed to TCP on a NAS), a SAN is better used for databases, clustering and backups. Until recently, SANs traditionally operated over Fibre Channel networks.

The just-released D-Link DSN-1100-10 xStack is a SAN array storage device that uses iSCSI, a protocol that enables SCSI commands to be transmitted over IP networks. With bays for up to five 3.5-inch SATA drives, the DSN-1100's current capacity tops out at 5 TB to 7.5 TB (when using 1-TB and 1.5-TB drives respectively). As with similar devices, it is expected to be able to handle larger drives with no problem as they become available.

Comparable in size and looks to the ReadyNAS Pro, D-Link's matte-black DSN-1100 measures 10.7 by 6.6 by 10.2 inches and weighs 8.8 pounds before adding hard drives. A lockable smoky gray door houses the five hot-swappable drive bays stacked vertically. To the right of each drive are two LEDs, one indicating power to the drive and the other an activity/fault display. Reviewers were able to confirm the functionality of these lights, as one of the drives we installed actually had an issue that triggered a red LED.

Three additional LEDs line the bottom of the front panel to display power status, device readiness and the condition of an on-board battery, which can back up to 1 GB of cached memory for up to 72 hours.

With four Gigabit Ethernet ports, the device is capable of speeds up to 425 MBps when the ports are aggregated as a group. An RJ-45 management port is also located in the rear. The unit can be configured for RAID levels 0, 1, 1+0 and 5.

Setting up the DSN-1100 (and any other iSCSI device) involves a little more than a TCP- based NAS. To connect to an iSCSI device or "target," you must use an iSCSI initiator. Most servers have initiator software installed and Microsoft has included it in Windows Vista as well. Since we were using a Windows XP system, reviewers had to download the software from Microsoft's Web site.

After assigning the target's NIC(s) with IP addresses, the iSCSI initiator software is launched via the Control Panel. This requires the user to enter the IP address or DSN name of the storage device as the Target Portal. You must then connect to the Target and bind the volume. At this point, Windows responds as if a new hard drive has just been added. Via the Storage Manager, the new volume must then be initialized, partitioned and formatted. The process is actually much less involved than the description makes it seem, and anyone with Windows administration skills should be able to configure everything in about 10 minutes or so.

Configuration of the unit is relatively simple. When the IP address is entered into a Web browser, a Java-based application is loaded. After logging in for the first time, a startup wizard launches and takes the user step-by-step through the setup. Administration is just as easy, with a graphical interface allowing visual status as well as changes to the physical storage information and configuration; standard system administration functions, such as user accounts and access rights; and network settings.

As would be expected of a device designed for data movement, the DSN-1100 came in on top for three out of the four speed tests, although by not as much of a margin as we would have predicted. Writing the 1.2-GB folder to the SAN took a scant 14 seconds, but the 3.2-GB folder took 5 minutes, 3 seconds. Read times were 26 seconds, and 1 minute, 28 seconds, respectively.

The DSN-1100 is a powerful storage option for small businesses that have disk-intensive applications. It has the performance and functionality of an enterprise-level system, in a small desktop form factor. With a suggested retail price of $1,799.99, not including drives, it is also higher-priced than other storage options. But taking into consideration that it offers the functionality and performance of more expensive SANs, without the added cost of additional host adapters and infrastructure, it's a viable option for those who need it.

Sans Digital MobileNAS MN4L+ Another desktop NAS, the Sans Digital MobileNAS MN4L+, is a snazzy-looking tower that houses four hot-swappable SATA drives. Available in black and silver, the 9-pound (without drives) 7 by 8.5 by 7-inch chassis forgoes a front panel door in favor of individually locking hard-drive trays. Since the key is merely the equivalent of a straightened paper clip (which also works), the locks aren't meant to be so much of a security feature as protection against accidental removal.

With a single Gigabit Ethernet port in the back, the MN4L+ supports RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5 and 6. Rear expansion ports for additional external hard drives include one eSATA, two USB 2.0 and one FireWire 400. As with similar devices, the MN4L+ can be configured to take scheduled snapshot backups and do realtime NAS-to-NAS folder replication. In addition, it includes an iSCSI initiator and target support.

Setup and configuration were relatively easy; after connecting the unit to power and the network, the included NAS-Finder program was launched. NAS-Finder is a menu-driven, DOS-based application that allows the user to configure the NAS with an IP address. After the IP address is assigned, the device can be managed remotely via a Web browser.

The GUI-based administration console is intuitive and allows the user to view and change the settings of the device. Easy to navigate, it consists of a frame running down the left side of the screen with approximately six category headings. Within each category are specific functions ranging from server configuration and network settings, to storage and user management and monitoring functions.

In our speed tests, the MN4L+ was a little slow with the smaller folder, but managed to hold its own with the larger one. Writing the 1.2-GB set of files took 36 seconds to the device and 32 seconds from it, while the 3.2-GB set of files took 3 minutes, 54 seconds to write and 3 minutes, 13 seconds to read.

Compared with other available storage devices, the Sans Digital storage device is not as feature-rich. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, however. Instead of trying to be all things to all users, the MN4L+ was designed to function specifically as a NAS, and that is something it does fairly well. Taking a minimalistic approach, it lacks a display and status indicators, but connection and usage are fairly easy. In addition, the $659 retail price is more than half that of its competitors'. If you're looking for nothing more than a NAS, the Sans Digital MN4L+ is a terrific option.

Iomega StorCenter ix2

The acquisition of Iomega by EMC Corp. holds the promise of new, innovative storage solutions. With Iomega's status as a leader in the consumer and SOHO storage space, and EMC's entrenchment in storage for the enterprise, the latest offering from Iomega combines the strength of both companies.

A dual-drive appliance, the Iomega StorCenter ix2 is a network storage device targeted at small business. Indeed, the ix2 is user-friendly, but it also has advanced management and backup capabilities, usually reserved for NAS devices for larger organizations.

The ix2 has 1 TB or 2 TB of storage capacity, depending on the model. With a management interface comprised of vibrant, snazzy colors, and with Vista-esque icons, users can easily manage data access and sharing along with a host of other tasks. RSA encryption helps to safeguard data residing on it. Other specs include RAID 1 and Gigabit Ethernet. The drives are SATA II and the appliance is outfitted with a 400MHz processor and 128 MB of memory. There are two USB ports that allow for sharing of printers and other peripherals.

The device setup took less than 10 minutes. StorCenter is the software that comes with the appliance. StorCenter was installed on a Windows Vista machine. When the ix2 was connected to the network, it was detected via DHCP without any problems by the software. The StorCenter interface walks a user through initial configuration, such as device name and admin account setup.

Midway through testing, reviewers switched the ix2 to another subnet. The ix2 easily reconfigured itself to the network information. The StorCenter interface picked up the new network IP address without a hitch.

The ix2 does the duty of a traditional NAS device—housing data and allowing for the management of access and retrieval of that data. Yet, the ix2 does a lot of other really cool things as well. The appliance can serve as a streaming media server. It's UPnP- and DLNA-compliant, so it can work with a wide range of digital devices. There is support for Bluetooth as well; pictures from smartphones can be uploaded to the ix2.

The media streaming works wonderfully. Simply set the folder containing the media as the media folder (a scan for media files can be initiated as well.) A client running media players like Nero, Apple iTunes, Windows Media Center or any DLNA-compliant media device can receive the stream.

CRN Test Center reviewers tried to test the Bluetooth capabilities using an Aten USB wireless G/Bluetooth adapter, but it would not work with the combo network adapter. After a few failed attempts, we discovered that it will only work with a stand-alone Bluetooth dongle adapter. Still, the ability to transfer data from a Bluetooth device to the NAS is rather unique.

The ix2 can even function as a low-cost video-surveillance system. The camera supported for this device is from Axis. When the camera is active, the live camera display can be viewed remotely. You can record through the interface as well.

With the Retrospect software backup feature, there are two options for backing up data: by creating restore points for recovering data and older versions of files or a computer's entire hard drive, or by saving a copy of the most recent files and overwriting all previous versions. Other noteworthy features include support for additional external storage and power management of connected UPS devices. The management interface can be set to a variety of languages. The StorCenter ix2 mixes the price and convenience of a standard external hard drive, and adds the functionality of NAS devices costing much more. The 1-TB model lists at $299 and the 2-GB for $479. For low-cost, abundant storage, and its feature-rich goodies, the ix2 is a great deal for the small business that can live with the smaller capacities.

The bottom line: Depending on your needs, any one of these four storage devices reviewed by the CRN Test Center would be a solid choice, and easily recommended. As an all-around device though, you can't beat the Netgear ReadyNAS Pro. Its speed, intuitive design, and ease of use place it at the top of our list. With the functionality to do just about anything you can ask of it, this NAS is ready for action.

The Definitive Guide to the ReadyNAS NVX - Netgear Launches the ReadyNAS NVX

2009-04-08T11:58:00.000-07:00

Overview

Since its introduction 3 years ago, the ReadyNAS NV and the follow-on NV+ have been the de facto choice of professionals, whether at the office or at home. They consistently garnered the highest ratings, and PC World even ranked the NV+ #8 in its “100 Best Products of 2007 Awards”. In a world where a product life cycle is measured in months, it’s very rare to find a design that lasts three years as the ReadyNAS NV product line has.

With that, the ReadyNAS team is proud to present the latest in our NV line — the ReadyNAS NVX, the fastest and most capable 4-bay desktop NAS in the world.

Identical in size to the NV+, the ReadyNAS NVX now sports a charcoal black exterior. And of course, it maintains the same chrome curved handle in the back, so you can easily move it between home and office if the need arises. In fact, much of the features that users have grown to love about the NV+ remains — the informative LCD in the front, the 4 hot-swappable disk trays behind the hidden mesh door, the backup button with a USB port at the top, and the two USB ports in the back.

What has changed is the brand-spanking new 1 GHz Intel CPU that replaces the NETGEAR IT3107 NSP that’s been the mainstay of the NV+. Add to that the 1 GB of fast SO-DIMM, and you have a system capable of hitting 85 MB/sec, more than what your typical PC or Mac can do locally, and twice as fast as the NV+.

The importance of protected storage

With everything now being stored digitally, a simple disk failure can be catastrophic, especially with the large capacity disks that are certainly the norm these days. And it really is not a matter of if but when you will have a massive data loss. Your whole family history captured on photos and videos will be lost at an instant. Your business will lose important documents and customer data and if you are lucky it will only cost your company with project delays, loss revenue and productivity. At the very worse, data loss can cost the company its livelihood. If the data is recoverable, it can be a time-consuming and expensive proposition. Ask yourself if your small or medium-size business can survive this sort of loss. Understandably, there’s a growing need for protected storage. If people don’t know what RAID (”Redundant Array of Independent Disks”) is today, they will find out soon enough. RAID is simply a way of pooling disks into one big virtual disk. If one of the disks in that pool fails, the data from the failed disk can be resurrected by the parity information kept on the surviving disks in the pool. In simple terms, this means that if one disk fails, access to your data is still intact. The cost of safe-guarding your data comes at a price of one disk capacity, regardless of whether your RAID volume consists of two drives or six drives. For example, a ReadyNAS with six 1 TB drives will have a protected capacity of 5 TB. With the price of disks being relatively cheap and data loss and recovery being so expensive, it’s really foolish not to use protected storage that RAID provides.

NVX comes with X-RAID2

The ReadyNAS NVX goes actually a step further than just RAID. It uses an ingenious technology developed by NETGEAR called X-RAID2™, a 2nd generation X-RAID technology that has been used in the existing award-winning line of ReadyNAS products. With X-RAID2, you can expand your data volume from one disk up to the max the ReadyNAS can house while the ReadyNAS is online. In a work environment, that means you don’t have to tell your staff to stop working while you’re trying to accommodate more capacity.

And once you’ve filled out all the slots and you’re near capacity, you can continue to expand by replacing out the disks one-by-one with larger disks, again, without needing to migrate your data out and back again. X-RAID2 will automatically expand when as little as two of your disks have extra capacity. Your data volume can keep growing every time you add a larger disk after that. It’s as simple as that — you don’t need a degree in RAID technology to do this. For a video demo about X-RAID2.

Other NAS may tout that they have “online” RAID expansion just like X-RAID, but take a closer look and you’ll see it’s just not quite that simple. Not only are there complex RAID migration steps involved, but they don’t mention that if you encounter a power loss during the process, you can say goodbye to your data for good.

With X-RAID2, you can turn off the power as many times as you want during the expansion, and it’ll continue where it left off.

The NVX is F-A-S-T

Mind-blazingly fast, that is. When was the last time your network drive was faster than the disk on your PC or Mac? To properly measure the performance potential in our performance lab, we had to utilize a large ramdisk or a RAID 0 with 3 striped disks on our client boxes. The local disks were clearly not fast enough to push the NVX.

With the proper setup, we clock it at 85 MB/sec (that’s megabytes per second) when reading and 78 MB/sec when writing to the ReadyNAS, and that’s with the NVX running in a protected X-RAID2 setting. With that type of speed, you can be sure it can handle a boat load of users and not suffer performance degradation like other devices would. And it means it’s a device you don’t have to throw out and replace in a couple years.

NVX at work

The ReadyNAS NVX is all business at the office, and it comes with 2 security levels suitable for environments with and without Active Directory service. Joining into an existing Active Directory environment is a snap, and within a few clicks, all existing users and groups from the directory can start using the ReadyNAS.

In addition, the NVX comes with snapshot support. Consider a snapshot as an instant point-in-time image of your data, sort of like a photo you take with a camera. Regardless of the number of files or the volume usage on the ReadyNAS, a snapshot only takes a couple of seconds, and you can continue using the ReadyNAS without interruption. If you inadvertantly change or delete files after you’ve taken a snapshot, you can always revert to the version saved in that snapshot. Just drag & drop files back from the snapshot share. This can be useful if your files were infected with a virus and you needed to revert back to a good copy.

A snapshot can also be scheduled to coincide with your backups. Typical backups can take hours, so a backup of a snapshot insures that you’re making copies of files that won’t be changing during the backup process.

On the subject of backup, the ReadyNAS comes with a built-in backup manager supporting a variety of file protocols, including CIFS, NFS, HTTP, FTP, and RSYNC. And because the backup manager runs right on the ReadyNAS, you don’t need to load a separate backup software on your client systems.

And with iSCSI support, the NVX can act as an iSCSI target LUN while still working as a NAS. This allows your Exchange or Oracle database to use a portion of your data volume for iSCSI, yet maintain the rest of the volume for file sharing. And in environments where Windows ACLs are required, iSCSI gives you that extra level of compatibility.

And the NVX allows the dual gigabit Ethernet interfaces to be bonded for optimal performance in multi-user environments and provide failover support in case of network failure.

As you can see, the ReadyNAS NVX is well-suited in business environments.

NVX in the home

With the number of computers in an average household approaching four or more, the need to consolidate storage and backup into one device, like the ReadyNAS NVX, is a definite appeal, especially if that device can provide versatility beyond just file sharing and data protection.

In the home, ReadyNAS systems are without a doubt the choice of the AV community. Not only does the NVX provides ample protected storage for all the digital media content, it can be used to stream to all popular media streaming devices, often referred to as DMAs (”Digital Media Adapters”) without the need to have you PC or Mac powered on. The trend definitely is to use low power-consuming devices like the ReadyNAS (more on this later) in place of general-purpose power-hungry desktop systems for streaming.

This means devices like PS3, XBOX 360, Logitech Squeezebox, SONOS Digital Music System, and NETGEAR’s own EVA 8000/9150 Digital Entertainer HD/Elite can all play media files straight from the NVX. Stream all you want — the NVX is designed to handle even the most demanding streaming applications with ease.

Nexsan iSeries Product Launch

2009-03-06T10:18:00.000-08:00

The much awaited Nexsan iSeries has launched.

Nexsan iSeries offers all the benefits of a Dell/EQ and HP/LH solution without the crippling architectural defects. Although the iSCSI SAN space already has players, huge gaps exist in the market which have been powerfully addressed by the unique architecture of the Nexsan iSeries making it the clear choice for SME’s and a growing number of large enterprises looking for a low cost alternative to FC SAN.

With an all-inclusive Tier 1 feature set combined with industry leading performance, reliability and energy efficiency, Nexsan iSeries is delivering the iSCSI SAN you need…at a price to meet your budget.

Overland Storage Launches NEO E-Series Family of Tape Libraries

2009-02-09T12:21:00.000-08:00

SAN DIEGO - February 9, 2009 - Overland Storage, Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL) today announced the availability of the first models in its next-generation NEO SERIES line of scalable, automated tape libraries. The NEO E-Series libraries provide a host of embedded functionality along with simplified installation and operation to meet a wide range of demanding data protection and long-term archive requirements.

The NEO 2000E and NEO 4000E extend the reliability, serviceability and data availability of the award-winning NEO SERIES tape backup and archive solution. The NEO product line, which has earned a reputation for rock-solid performance and widespread compatibility, has been enhanced with a variety of embedded capabilities that reinforce technology leadership and investment protection. The new NEO E-Series enables embedded SCSI, FC and SAS connectivity, easing installations while ensuring connectivity with future interface technologies. Other embedded capabilities include:

• Improved performance and feature support with enhanced processing power,
• Further investment protection via Integrated partitioning,
• More efficient data access due to improved mailslot functionality,
• Ease of management via remote diagnostics with proactive monitoring,
• Superior reliability and serviceability through the use of enhanced robotics, more efficient power supply and innovative library/drive interface.

Additionally, the new NEO E-Series integrates easily with Overland’s REO SERIES® of disk-based backup and recovery VTLs, Snap Server® NAS appliances, ULTAMUS® RAID SAN storage as well as other disk-based products.

According to Ravi Pendekanti, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for Overland Storage, the latest enhancements to the NEO tape family strengthen the company’s leadership in providing mid-range customers with affordable, scalable end-to-end data protection solutions. “Over the past decade, the NEO tape libraries have proven themselves as important assets in our customers’ end-to-end data protection and archiving strategies,” he says. “Therefore, it is imperative that we continue to add new features and functionality while leveraging NEO’s highly regarded and trusted tape technology and proven product architecture.”

In addition to enhancing reliability and serviceability, the NEO E-Series adds support for LTO HH tape drive technologies and direct-connect interfaces, lowering initial expenditures and enabling customers to add new capabilities over time while protecting their investments in tape-based backup and recovery.

According to Robert Amatruda, research director at IDC for tape and removable storage, the mid-range tape automation market is expected to exceed $1 billion in annual sales, with more than 100,000 units shipped in 2008. “The majority of companies still depend on tape for long-term archive and disaster recovery,” he says. “Overland’s new NEO E-Series, with its increased functionality, should integrate well with a company's existing disk-based solutions, and help companies meet recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO) in both SAN and NAS environments.”

With the new NEO E-Series, Overland’s resellers are well positioned to provide their customers with expansion-on-demand and flexible functionality that scales easily to keep pace with increasing backup and archive needs. “Most of our customers use tape for handling backups or as an archive solution in a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) scenario,” explains Dan Peichel, vice president of sales for Peripheral Products Inc., a Plano, Tex.-based Overland channel partner. “We are extremely pleased to see Overland extend the capabilities of the well-established NEO platform, ensuring that this high-capacity, flexible product line remains a major part of our customer offerings for years to come.”

Overland’s NEO 2000E scales from 30 to 240 cartridges per module while the NEO 4000E scales from 60 to 240 cartridges. NEO2000E and 4000E can be scaled with each other in an almost limitless combination, providing a variety of capacity points to meet end user needs. Both tape library models are available now from Overland’s channel partners worldwide with a starting MSRP of $12,333.

Overland Storage Reports Fiscal 2nd Quarter 2009 Results

2009-02-06T15:20:00.000-08:00

SAN DIEGO - February 5, 2009 - Overland Storage, Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL) today reported results for its fiscal 2009 second quarter and six-month period ended December 31, 2008

Net revenue for the fiscal 2009 second quarter was $28.9 million, compared with $34.1 million for the same quarter a year ago. The company reported a net loss of $5.2 million, or $0.40 per share, for the fiscal 2009 second quarter compared with a net loss of $6.5 million, or $0.51 per share, for the same quarter in the prior fiscal year.

For the first six months of fiscal 2009, the company reported net revenue of $61.3 million compared with $67.0 million for the same period in the prior fiscal year. The net loss for the first half of fiscal 2009 was $12.1 million, or $0.94 per share, compared with a net loss of $11.0 million, or $0.86 per share, in the first half of fiscal 2008.

The company noted that net revenue for the fiscal 2009 second quarter decreased 15.2 percent from the fiscal 2008 second quarter primarily due to lower sales to the company’s largest OEM customer. Total OEM revenue was down 37.1 percent compared to the fiscal 2008 second quarter. This trend continues to reflect the previously announced transition by the customer to a new product from an alternate supplier. Total branded revenue declined only 1.7 percent compared to branded revenue in the second quarter of fiscal 2008. Sales in the Americas region was relatively flat compared to the prior year quarter, while a 15.1 percent decline in EMEA and a 40.2 percent decline in APAC were offset by a 24.4 percent increase in revenue of service and spares.

Gross profit in the fiscal 2009 second quarter of $7.7 million nearly equaled the $7.8 million in gross profit reported in the prior year quarter, despite the 15.2 percent net revenue decline noted above. The gross profit margin of 26.7 percent for the fiscal 2009 second quarter improved over the fiscal 2008 second quarter margin of 22.8 percent.

Operating expenses of $12.6 million in the fiscal 2009 second quarter declined 9.4 percent from $13.9 million in the fiscal 2008 second quarter reflecting the company’s August 29, 2008 restructuring. Sales and marketing expenses declined 6.5 percent and R&D expenses declined 15.6 percent compared to the fiscal 2008 second quarter. On a sequential basis, the operating expense decline was more pronounced. Total operating expenses declined 19.2 percent compared to $15.6 million in the fiscal 2009 first quarter. The high level of operating expenses in the first fiscal quarter reflects the acquisition of the Snap Appliance business at the end of June 2008, and severance costs relating to the August restructuring.

The total cash balance at the end of the quarter was $3.0 million, a decline of $2.3 million from the end of the fiscal 2009 first quarter. Inventory levels were reduced by $1.3 million in the fiscal 2009 second quarter from the first quarter.

“The challenges we faced in the December quarter were significant,” stated Vern LoForti, president of Overland Storage, Inc. “We were impacted by a combination of the difficult worldwide economic conditions and concerns in the first two months of the quarter about our ability to obtain financing, both of which hampered sales. In late November, we secured a $9 million accounts receivable financing line that alleviated some concerns. But, in order to ensure a return to profitability, we acknowledged the need to modify our business model.

“During this process, our board of directors was extremely supportive. Eric Kelly, who joined the board in November 2007 bringing 30 years experience in the data storage sector, began working with management on a full-time basis to formulate a new plan. Together we presented a new financial plan to the board. As announced last week, the board determined that the best way to execute the plan was to have us split the CEO and president roles. Eric now serves as CEO while I continue as president. We are both dedicated to seeing Overland succeed, and believe that our skills are complementary. Having spent 13 years at Overland, I am highly vested in our company. Eric, having previously run Snap as an independent company and generated significant value there, is determined to see Snap become a successful and integral component of Overland’s product portfolio and strategy. We intend to leverage Overland’s complete portfolio of end-to-end data protection products and our valuable sales channel,” stated LoForti.

“We developed our new financial model to significantly reduce the breakeven point, and that has become our near-term goal,” commented Eric Kelly, CEO of Overland Storage, Inc. “We aimed to hit breakeven at a net revenue level below $30 million per quarter. In order to achieve this goal, we attacked product costs and operating expenses, a process that entailed highly focused discussions with our suppliers and employees. Some difficult decisions were required, and on January 9, 2009, we announced a restructuring that included a 17 percent reduction in our worldwide workforce and a 10 percent pay-cut for all employees.

“We targeted specific areas where we believe we can generate significant savings,” continued Kelly. “We identified approximately $2.5 million of product-related cost reductions that we expect will improve our gross profit margin. We are consolidating our facilities and reducing other spending with the goal of cutting an additional $3.4 million of cost and expenses. We anticipate the annual savings from the reduction-in-force will amount to approximately $5.5 million. We expect the pay-cut and related changes to generate $2.9 million in annual savings. Aggregated, we anticipate these actions should amount to annual savings of $14.3 million. Though these cuts substantially change our business model, they are intended to assure the viability of Overland and fuel the growth of our business.

“Despite the global economic conditions, IDC estimates storage growth at 60 percent annually,” Kelly added. “We believe that global demand will continue for end-to-end data protection solutions that offer storage tiering, thin provisioning, data deduplication and enterprise file-based storage delivered at an optimal value proposition. Overland excels at this formula, providing the required solution at the best price. We are committed to offering both tape- and disk-based solutions that address storage needs for both structured and unstructured data in the SMB and distributed enterprise markets. To operate efficiently and maximize storage utilization, IT managers must take advantage of new technologies, including data deduplication that Overland’s REO® 9500d provides, and thin provisioning capabilities as offered by the Dynamic Virtual Tape™ (DVT) feature embedded in Overland’s other REO VTL solutions.

“As Vern already pointed out, network attached storage (NAS) solutions are critical to solving customers’ unstructured data requirements. As Snap represents the largest worldwide NAS-installed base, we plan to leverage this position to continue providing storage solutions to the distributed enterprise and the SMB space. Our goal is to integrate and magnify Snap’s performance within Overland, thereby creating greater and significant value for Overland shareholders. Though much work lies ahead, we have already identified a number of ways to add value to the existing Snap platform and to elevate it as a market force. Our recent push into the video surveillance market is one example. The Snap platform is ideally suited for this rapidly growing market already in the midst of a technology shift, moving from analog to high-resolution digital capture and storage. We are currently at work expanding the Snap operating system to include unique features and capabilities designed to enhance its ability to function as a network video recorder and storage management system. The development process is never static, and we are working on capability expansions of the Snap software and hardware. As evidence, we introduced version 5.0 of the Guardian OS operating system last September with enhanced data replication software and the Snap Server 620 model with dual-core AMD Opteron processors that deliver 63 percent faster performance.

“Lastly, I would like to comment on tape,” added Kelly. “Overland’s NEO® Series of tape automation products has a rock-solid reputation in the industry. End-users find significant value in the reliability, scalability and expanded feature set of NEO, factors that the standard value-line automation products on the market fail to adequately address. We will soon be announcing an enhanced version of NEO that we believe will further its value and translate into increased demand.

“Though conscious of the challenging worldwide economy, we believe that our new business plan substantially modifies the prospects for Overland’s longevity and prosperity,” concluded Kelly. "We now turn to the job of execution. Knowing the experience and dedication of the Overland team, we believe that we are up to the task, and are highly confident of our success.”

Overland Storage Appoints Snap Pioneer Eric kelly CEO

2009-02-02T14:47:00.000-08:00

SAN DIEGO – January 28, 2009 – Overland Storage, Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL) today announced the appointment of Eric Kelly, a current member of its board of directors, as the company’s new chief executive officer. Vern LoForti, who previously served as the company’s president and CEO, will continue to serve as president.

Kelly joined Overland’s board in November 2007, bringing nearly 30 years of experience in computer technology with an emphasis on operational, marketing and sales expertise. He previously was president of Silicon Valley Management Partners Inc., a management consulting and M&A advisory firm, which he co-founded in 2007. Kelly previously served as president of Maxtor Corporation's systems business, and also held positions at Dell Computer Corp., Diamond Multimedia, Conner Peripherals and IBM.

In 2002, Kelly assembled a group of private equity investors and engineered the purchase of Snap Appliance from Quantum Corp. for $10 million. Kelly recognized the product line’s inherent value, and, as Snap’s president and CEO, led the business to become the worldwide volume leader in the Network Attached Storage market. Only 18 months later in July 2004, Kelly sold the Snap business to Adaptec, Inc. in a transaction valued at $100.4 million, representing over a 10-fold increase in the value of the business. He then served as vice president and general manager of Adaptec’s storage systems solutions for two more years. Then, in early 2008, after joining Overland’s board the previous November, Kelly saw another opportunity to reacquire Snap as Adaptec put the business on the market. He helped facilitate the acquisition of Snap by Overland in June 2008 for a purchase price of $3.6 million.

“I firmly believe that the intrinsic value of Overland is significantly greater than its current market valuation. The combination of the Snap business, with which I am intimately familiar, the existing Overland product portfolio, and the coveted branded sales channel that Overland has built over the past 20 years, is a potent combination which we plan to leverage,” said Kelly. “As a member of a special committee of Overland’s Board formed to review the company's operations, I have worked closely with the management team to formulate the restructuring plan that was announced earlier this month. We have a solid plan to return the company to profitability, and I am confident that we can execute our strategic plan and build value for our shareholders and employees.”

Overland announces creation of Solutions Engineering Group

2009-01-23T09:40:00.000-08:00

SAN DIEGO – January 22, 2009 – Overland Storage, Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL) today announced the creation of a Solutions Engineering Group focused on expediting the development and delivery of complete data protection offerings that solve today’s toughest data protection problems. The newly formed team will leverage Overland’s existing portfolio of tape, disk, NAS and SAN products along with innovative applications and third-party products to address a vast array of data protection challenges.

Dan Davies, a storage industry veteran who previously led the company’s applications engineering organization, will spearhead the new group as vice president of solutions engineering. In this new role, Davies will be responsible for defining, testing and delivering market-leading solutions that meet the ever-evolving data protection needs of Overland’s partners and customers worldwide. Overland’s global sales and marketing organizations also have been realigned to ensure widespread support of the company’s solution-selling efforts.

According to Vern LoForti, president and CEO of Overland Storage, this strengthened focus on developing integrated data protection solutions will enable Overland and its channel partners to be more agile and responsive in delivering complete turnkey solutions that help end-users solve their data protection problems more easily and affordably. “In today’s extremely challenging economic environment, it’s imperative for Overland to deliver total solutions that help our partners expedite sales and implementation,” he says. “In addition, our new solutions engineering strategy will allow us to minimize spending, while leveraging our existing product platforms and resources by adding value through increased partnerships and licensing arrangements. The ultimate goal is an improved offering for our customers, reduced expense in our business model and a faster return to profitability.”

Overland’s recent move into the video surveillance market is an example of this renewed focus on solutions-focused engineering and sales. In October 2008, Overland announced a strategic alliance with Mobotix Vision Systems, the leader in high-resolution IP cameras, to speed the deployment of integrated video surveillance and archiving solutions featuring Mobotix cameras and Overland’s high-performance, economical Snap Server network attached storage (NAS). Overland’s new Solutions Engineering team will continue to pursue additional joint solutions where the company can integrate other applications with its REO® disk backup VTLs, NEO® and ARCvault® tape libraries, as well as Snap Server® NAS and ULTAMUS® RAID SAN appliances to meet the widest possible range of end-user requirements.

Overland’s solutions focus aligns well with the needs of key resellers and channel partners in the data protection market. ”Overland’s elevated solutions approach complements our focus on virtualization, archiving and business continuity applications to provide tremendous value to our customers,” says Dave Rasmussen, senior sales consultant at Mosaic Technology. “Overland’s product set, combined with their understanding of what it takes to deliver a complete solution, not only makes them highly capable of solving real-world problems but also helps us close business much faster.”

Overland Storage secures $9 million in Financing

2008-12-04T15:58:00.000-08:00

Overland Storage, Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL) today announced that it had closed an accounts receivable financing transaction with Marquette Commercial Finance. Under the terms of the agreement, Marquette may finance up to $9 million of the company’s domestic accounts receivable to provide the company with accelerated liquidity. The term of the agreement is two years with annual renewals thereafter.

“This financing agreement with Marquette will allow us to continue our recovery and execute our strategy,” stated Vern LoForti, president and chief executive officer of Overland Storage. “I remain encouraged by the strength and commitment of the Overland team, and by the support of our channel partners who continue to stand by us. We are focused on harvesting our recent investment in the Snap Server business and in delivering new solutions that can leverage the variety of platforms represented by the Overland family of data protection appliances.

“We are grateful to the team at FTI Capital Advisors, LLC who assisted us in our search and, in spite of a very challenging financing environment, worked tirelessly to provide us with a number of options, including Marquette. Likewise, we are excited to be working with the team at Marquette, who has been extremely responsive and professional, and has the backing of a very successful and well capitalized parent company,” concluded LoForti.

Overland Storage provides affordable end-to-end data protection solutions that are engineered to store smarter, protect faster and extend anywhere — across networked storage, media types, and multi-site environments. Overland Storage products include award-winning NEO SERIES® and ARCvault® tape libraries, REO SERIES® disk-based backup and recovery appliances with VTL capabilities, Snap Server® NAS appliances, and ULTAMUS® RAID high-performance, high-density storage. Overland sells its products through leading OEMs, commercial distributors, storage integrators and value-added resellers.

NAS - Best Practices

2008-11-05T12:50:00.000-08:00

About 15 years ago, in the days when NetApp was known as Network Appliance, the company set out to make a network-attached storage (NAS) system that would be easy to use and easy to manage.

Today's NAS products remain true to that guiding principle.

"The reality of the situation is that just about every NAS box you can buy today, from startups or from established players, is up and running in 20 minutes," says Arun Taneja, founder and president of the Taneja Group, a consulting firm that focuses on storage technologies. "They're all very easy to use."

Storage administrators who want to tailor their NAS arrays to work with certain applications or under specific situations can easily find countless white papers and guides on NAS vendor websites. For instance, NetApp's online library lists more than 30 technical reports with the words "best practices" in the title. The vendor offers recommendations on how to run NetApp products with databases from Oracle, Microsoft and MySQL, virtualization software from VMware and Microsoft, and ERP software from SAP, just to name a few.

And sometimes it does pay to read the fine print, as the Sacramento Superior Court learned the hard way in July. No one in the IT department there had noticed NetApp's recommendation to use a dedicated connection for each of the ports in its Cisco switch until it was too late. Since the switch is responsible for 90% of the court's servers, there was substantial downtime while the IT staff diagnosed the problem. Now that the Ethernet module has been upgraded, performance has spiked dramatically, according to Lewis Walker, a senior IT analyst at the state court.

But beyond consulting the white papers, there are five universal best practices that apply to NAS arrays.

Best Practice #1. Plan ahead, make future needs your top priority

Walker advises his storage peers to take into account their anticipated product replacement cycles as they assess their long-term storage needs. If it's four years, they need to size out the environment as best they can with that endpoint as the goal. But he also recommends they build in some headroom for unanticipated requests.

"Once you get the technology, someone's going to want to adapt it to do something that no one thought of," Walker says. "Everybody wants to use it."

The Sacramento Superior Court reached the limit of 12 disk shelves on its NetApp FAS 3020 within three years and recently put in a purchase order to upgrade to the FAS 3140, which can take 30 disk shelves, Walker notes.

According to Taneja, users tend to like their first NAS boxes so much that they can fill them up within a few months, if they're not careful. Then they go get a second box and changes need to be made on the client side so the computer knows where to find the files, which, he
notes, is "not trivial if you've got 2,000 users." When the second box reaches capacity, the company adds a third and a fourth and so on, until they find themselves with a management nightmare.

"NAS has a habit of growing like rabbits, and the more rabbits you have, the bigger your headache," Taneja says. He advises clients to do a systematic analysis before installing NAS, but "usually they come to me when they've bashed their heads, and they're already at a hundred."

When weighing expansion plans, administrators also need to think about what sorts of policies they might put in place, such as
limits on MP3 files or personal data. They should use management tools to study how the NAS array is being used, how many files are in the system and how many are active to gain insight into how they can manage more effectively.

"The administrators of the NAS system, at some point, have to ask themselves whether they can just keep buying storage," says Robert Passmore, an analyst at Gartner Inc., noting that "some people establish quotas, which forces the users occasionally to go back and delete files." But the quota system, he says, is "disruptive to the organization." Automatic archiving of files that are no longer in use onto lower cost media is a better option.

Best Practice # 2. Tier the data and automate the process

All disks are not created equal. A Fibre Channel drive might spin at 15,000 rpm, but it's also far too costly and power-hogging to use for low-priority data. Less important files might make more
sense on a cheaper, power-efficient, high-density SATA drive spinning at 5,400 rpm.

But putting the data on the right type of disk at the right time – or tiering – isn't enough, according to Brad Bunce, EMC's director of product marketing for NAS platforms. "Tiering the data allows you to control your costs from a disk perspective," he says. "The key is to have automation in the tiering. The last thing administrators want to be doing is running reports to find stale data and then manually move it."

Bunce described how the process works in an EMC storage system that permits different drive types in the same array. A Celerra file-mover API leveraged with EMC's Rainfinity file management appliance (FMA)
allows users to automate the movement of data based on policies.

If a policy calls for relocating files that haven't been accessed for 30 days, the FMA moves the file from the high-performance disk to the low-performance disk. A stub is left behind to the real file location, so a user or application doesn't know the file has moved. When the file is recalled, the client can directly access the file at its new location.

Another option is selecting products from different storage vendors. The Sacramento Superior Court uses NetApp's FAS midrange systems for its most mission-critical data but opted for a lower-cost Hewlett-Packard NAS box running Microsoft's Windows Storage Server for less important, second-tier data, such as employees' private drives. The court sacrifices useful features, such as thin provisioning and data deduplication with the HP system, which it must manage separately, but the cost savings have been substantial, says Walker.

"As good as NetApp is, they are expensive," he says. "You get what you pay for."

Best Practice #3. Thin provision whenever possible

With thin provisioning, an administrator sets the high-water mark for the storage's ultimate limit, then provisions only a small amount to start, allowing the NAS array to automatically grow the file systems or iSCSI LUNs as users request more storage. Alerts warn administrators when they're due to run out of physical storage so they can add capacity on the fly, nondisruptively, to keep operations humming.

The leaders in the NAS space, NetApp and EMC, offer thin provisioning to maximize storage efficiency, as do many other vendors. "Set it and forget it," is how EMC's Bunce describes the process. A simple checkmark in the company's Celerra storage system enables the feature, which prevents administrators from over-provisioning and allows them to leverage unused capacity for other purposes, if necessary.

Best Practice #4. Take snapshots of the data

Creating logical point-in-time copies of the data will pay off the first time a file is lost, corrupted or accidentally deleted. Restoring data from the snapshot is quick compared to the time-consuming ordeal of going to the tape or some other subsystem. Plus, snapshots consume little space, have no impact on performance and even permit users to recover the data on their own, if enabled.

"Make sure that snapshot gets backed up somewhere," warns Greg Schulz, founder of StorageIO Group. The backup can be on another NAS array, a disk or a tape, he says. "The array might be set up to do snapshots on its own, but if something happens to that array, your backup just went away. In other words, be in total protection."

Best Practice 5. Secure the array and the data

With NAS, a storage administrator is attaching to a network, and that's the value proposition of NAS: to be able to share over a network. "That's the good news," Schulz said. "The bad news is you are going to share over a network, which means you have the potential that unauthorized people could access that data."

So the file systems need to be secured. Authentication mechanisms need to be put in place. Authorizations need to be set so only the appropriate users are permitted to access certain files. Administrative privileges need to be established to limit the number of people who can change the settings. Management tools and interfaces also need to be protected.

"There's both administrative and user security around files," Passmore said.

The Sacramento Superior Court uses Microsoft's Active Directory in conjunction with its NAS array to avoid the "administrative nightmare" of having to update user rights in two places, Walker says.

Also important is implementing best practices for virus protection, since a file stored on a NAS system could be infected. Vendors typically provide instructions for doing this.

Overland Reports - Fiscal 2009 1st Quarter Results

2008-10-23T16:44:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage, Inc. today reported results for its fiscal 2009 first quarter ended September 30, 2008.

Net revenue for the fiscal 2009 first quarter was $32.3 million, compared with $32.9 million for the same period a year ago. The company reported a net loss of $6.9 million, or $0.54 per share, for the fiscal 2009 first quarter, compared with a net loss of $4.5 million, or $0.35 per share, for the same period a year earlier.

The company noted that increased sales through its branded sales channel nearly offset the expected sales decline to OEM customers during the fiscal 2009 first quarter in comparison to the fiscal 2008 first quarter. Specifically, in the fiscal 2009 first quarter, sales to the company's largest OEM customer were down 25.2 percent compared to the fiscal 2008 first quarter, reflecting the continuing transition by the customer to a different product. Conversely, the company's branded revenue increased 12.3 percent compared to the prior year quarter, reflecting the addition of revenue from the Snap Server® line of products that the company acquired on June 27, 2008.

The company further noted that net revenue for the fiscal 2009 first quarter grew 11.6 percent on a sequential basis, compared to net revenue of $28.9 million in the fiscal 2008 fourth quarter. Sales to OEM customers, representing 28.1 percent of net revenue in the fiscal 2009 first quarter, actually increased 2.2 percent compared to the preceding quarter. Non-OEM revenue grew by 16.5 percent sequentially.

Gross profit increased 34.8 percent from $6.5 million in the fiscal 2008 first quarter to $8.7 million in the fiscal 2009 first quarter; and the gross margin percentage improved from 19.7 percent in the fiscal 2008 first quarter to 27.0 percent in the fiscal 2009 first quarter. The company noted that these improvements reflect the continuing shift toward a higher concentration of branded revenue vs. OEM revenue, an improved product mix, as well as reduced inventory charges and warranty costs.

Operating expenses in the fiscal 2009 first quarter were $15.6 million, a 40.5 percent increase from $11.1 million in the previous year first quarter. The significant increase in spending compared to the prior year resulted from an expansion of the sales force, the addition of the Snap Server business at the beginning of the quarter, and costs associated with the restructuring announced by the company on August 29, 2008. At that time, the company stated that it had reduced anticipated spending for its fiscal year 2009 by approximately $10 million.

"It was a challenging quarter, but there are two very positive elements included in our reported results that I want to highlight," stated Vern LoForti, president and chief executive officer of Overland Storage. "First is the 16.5 percent sequential growth in branded revenue from the 2008 fourth quarter. This increase reflects an improved revenue stream from the Snap acquisition. Second is the significant improvement in our gross profit margin to 27.0 percent. Revenue growth and higher gross profit margins are key elements to our recovery.

"In our first quarter, we accomplished two significant tasks: the integration of the Snap business that we bought at the end of June and the restructuring that we triggered at the end of August. In both instances, I am extremely pleased with the timeliness and efficiency of these transitions. By the end of September, we had substantially completed the integration of both the Snap personnel and its business systems into Overland, as originally planned. At this point, we have completed training our worldwide sales force about Snap products and continue training our channel partners. We are now introducing the products to our entire channel, a critical step toward maximizing our Snap investment.

"In September, we announced a new version of the Snap software base, called GuardianOS(TM) 5.0, and a new version of the Snap replication engine, called Snap Enterprise Data Replicator(TM) 7.2. We are now shipping these new software elements with all of our Snap products. In addition, we announced an expansion to the Snap product line, the Snap Server 620, which delivers 63 percent faster performance than its predecessor. A further development is a new strategic relationship with Mobotix Vision Systems, the leader in highresolution IP network cameras. We formed this partnership to deliver a bundled solution that includes Snap Servers and Mobotix's line of digital, network-based video security solutions. We believe this combination provides a simple and compelling solution to the rapidly growing video surveillance market.

"Following the Snap acquisition, we restructured in order to adjust our operating expense structure. Though we cut approximately $10 million in planned fiscal 2009 spending, we believe that we have preserved the ability to execute our strategy and to grow revenue throughout fiscal 2009. The restructuring was too late in the quarter to positively affect the first quarter's results, and the quarter did have to absorb the costs associated with the restructuring. As a result of the restructuring, we expect to see an operating expense reduction of approximately 15 percent from first-quarter levels in the remaining three quarters of the fiscal year. On a related note, I am extremely pleased with the reformulated sales and marketing team, led by Ravi Pendekanti, which already produced a significant sales ramp in September after the seasonal lull in August and the uncertainty surrounding our then pending restructuring.

"We ended the September quarter with $5.4 million in cash. In order to continue to execute our strategy, we are seeking $10 million in funding and have retained a financial advisor to assist us in this effort. Although the current worldwide financial environment is extremely challenging, we are in discussion with a number of institutions that are still actively lending. In fact, we are now in the process of evaluating letters of intent for funding arrangements, and hope to be able to put a facility in place soon.

"The addition of the Snap NAS product line enables us to offer a portfolio of end-to-end data protection solutions not offered by the majority of our competitors. We are extremely encouraged by the high level of interest expressed by many of our channel partners in Snap and in the new video surveillance solutions," concluded LoForti. "Our expanded product set and newly energized sales team is a potent combination that we hope will be the catalyst to improved results in the future."

Getting the most out of an iSCSI SAN

2008-08-04T12:04:00.000-07:00

One best practice overrides all others when deploying an iSCSI storage area network (SAN). An IT organization must separate the storage traffic, either physically or logically, from the ordinary LAN traffic to run the network efficiently.

The SAN shouldn't have to compete for bandwidth. Isolating the storage traffic will help to improve response times, prevent bottlenecks, nip potential performance issues in the bud and build in security. Segregating SAN traffic also helps to address the TCP/IP overhead and flow control issues inherent in an Ethernet network.
"A lot of people assume, 'I've got a couple of free Ethernet ports on existing servers. I'll just use those for SAN and throw my data traffic over them,' " said Rick Villars, a storage industry analyst at International Data Corp. "That's not going to work very well. You're going to find that the iSCSI traffic is much more intense than the data traffic."

Logical separation means setting up a virtual LAN to segregate the SAN traffic from the LAN traffic. The physical route involves dedicating separate Ethernet switches to the iSCSI network – not hooking into corporate switches that were already in use. That may necessitate the addition of a couple of new Ethernet ports.

Beyond the best practice of separating the storage traffic, the rules of good storage management apply. Some other best practices for operating iSCSI SANs include:

Buy, build and configure all parts of the iSCSI SAN as fully redundant.
Robert Passmore, an analyst at Gartner Inc., emphasized that any SAN or storage outage is disruptive, so 100% uptime is the goal. That means an organization must pay attention to even "the tiniest details," he noted.

His advice: Build two independent fabrics and select switches that support nondisruptive firmware upgrades. Choose a storage array that is fully redundant with no single points of failure; it should support multiple spare disks and automatic rebuilds and nondisruptive upgrades of hardware and software. Each controller board should have at least two iSCSI ports, each going to a separate Ethernet fabric. If you buy a 16-port switch, buy another one and connect one network interface card (NIC) card to one switch and another NIC card to another switch. Take regular snapshots of the data synchronized with the application, the SAN switch configurations and the array configurations. Consider setting up a second site with fully redundant hardware, and create a disaster recovery plan.

On the staffing side, establish a trained and dedicated storage team to monitor the environment and enforce rigid change control procedures. "I was finding a lot of users who thought that high availability was restricted to buying hardware with no single point of failure and building redundant networks," Passmore said. "They were ignoring human error."

Ensure that the management tools are secure.
Deploying software tools that let IT shops set administrative rolls and limit the scope of actions each individual can take will help keep the iSCSI SAN environment under control. Ensure that only authorized employees can access the tools and physical assets. Administrators need to make sure that only the desired servers can access the designated target storage.

"The good news with regular Ethernet is that any server should be able to get to the storage," said Greg Schulz, founder and analyst at consulting firm The StorageIO Group. "That's also the bad thing. It's a potential security risk. So take adequate steps to make sure that only the servers that are intended or authorized are the ones that are in fact able to access the storage."

Use performance analytics tools.
Examining server workloads and measuring the IOPS going in and out of the storage array can help to determine which network architecture is the best fit, advised Andrew Reichman, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. Although some organizations do that by trial and error, diagnostic tools afford the more scientific approach.

Reichman recommends building a cost model to assess the benefits of iSCSI and facilitate intelligent decision making on which network is right for each application and workload.

One option is a hybrid SAN in which mission-critical or performance-oriented servers go on the Fibre Channel network and smaller and less critical servers go onto iSCSI. Choosing a multiprotocol storage array that supports both Fibre Channel and iSCSI will help; some enable a primary path on Fibre Channel and a secondary path on iSCSI to build in redundancy at a lower cost point.

When using iSCSI SANs with virtual server environments, devise a plan to effectively balance the load between the servers, the storage and the network.
One of the drivers for iSCSI SAN growth is the popularity of server virtualization technology from vendors such as VMware Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Citrix Systems Inc. The special characteristics of those environments need to be factored into the equation.

"If you don't have discipline in setting up virtual servers and adding additional performance and capacity, you can reach a point where suddenly you've got 400 virtual machines all trying to access the same storage array," said Villars. "There, it doesn't matter if you have Fibre Channel or iSCSI. If you put that kind of load on the system, somewhere in the network or in the array, it will break."

Because server workloads can be shifted to different physical boxes with ease in virtual environments, check to see if the storage array comes with advanced virtualization functionality of its own. Pointing a server to a virtual volume, rather than assigning a disk to a specific server, will make it easier to shift data between different disks or systems without disrupting the server application.

Also useful in virtual server environments is thin provisioning, whereby disk storage space is allocated on demand to boost efficient use of storage capacity in SANs. "In a virtual environment, if you don't have thin provisioning, you can very quickly eat up all your storage," said Villars.

Overland Storage buys Snap Server from Adaptec

2008-07-01T15:38:00.000-07:00

Overland Storage Inc. today got into the NAS market by acquiring the Snap Server product line, intellectual property and engineering group from Adaptec Inc. for $3.6 million.

The purchase price was far below the $100 million Adaptec paid for privately held Snap Appliance in July of 2004.

Here's what Overland is getting: the Snap Server 650, Snap Server 520, Snap Server 410, Snap Server 210 and Snap Server 110 NAS products that range from 1 TB to 88 TB in capacity with SATA and SAS drives, the Snap Server GuardianOS operating system and a team of around 50 engineers, sales and marketing people.

Overland CEO Vern LoForti said the Snap brand and product line will remain intact, and Overland will eventually use the IP for its REO disk backup products to try and accelerate the transition from a tape vendor to an overall data protection provider. Overland executives said they expect a relatively easy path in integrating products because the GuardianOS and Overland's REO Protection OS are both based on the Linux 2.6 kernel

"The Snap Server acquisition enables us to offer NAS today, and going forward we're looking forward to cross-pollination of the product with our existing products," said Ravi Pendekanti, Overland's vice president of marketing. "And, we'll do that on a pretty aggressive schedule."

Snap NAS systems target small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) and remote offices or departments of small enterprises, and compete primarily with Windows-based NAS systems, such as Dell's PowerVault and Hewlett-Packard's ProLiant.

LoFortti sees a lucrative market for Snap products between the high-end enterprise NAS market dominated by NetApp and EMC, and consumer NAS boxes sold by Buffalo Technology, NetGear, Seagate and others. Overland claims more than 200,000 Snap units have shipped over the years. LoForti is also looking to expand into the emerging video surveillance and video product markets.

Adaptec had little success with Snap products, recording $4.5 million in revenue last quarter. After selling off Snap, Adaptec will concentrate on its serial RAID controller and iSCSI storage business.

LoForti said the Snap product was held back at Adaptec, which has focused mostly on its components business over the last few years. Adaptec tried to sell Snap off in late 2005 but failed to land a deal.

"We said, 'can we turn this thing around?'" LoForti said. "Every person within Snap feels they have had their hands tied and haven't had as much support as they could or should have."
Overland considered buying Snap in 2004, but the asking price was too high, LoForti said.

Former Snap Appliance CEO Eric Kelly joined the Overland board last December and recommended that Overland acquire Snap when Adaptec put it back on the market.
"Eric said I think you guys ought to buy it," LoForti said. "If you don't want it, I'll buy it myself. He's going to help us going forward to make sure we leverage it properly."

So can Overland succeed where Adaptec failed? Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Brian Babineau said Adaptec failed with Snap largely because it is a components vendor rather than a systems vendor. "It's a different business model," Babineau said. "If you don't' invest in your systems business, you're not going to have much luck. Overland sells systems, they know what the investment looks like."

Overland has been trying to reinvent itself since it lost a tape OEM deal with Hewlett-Packard in 2005 that represented most of the company's revenue. Overland's last attempt to get into NAS turned out poorly. It acquired startup Zetta Systems for $9 million in 2005 but closed its offices and discontinued its product line based on Zetta software a year later.

Nexsan Tops Green Storage at Industry Awards - SASBoy and SATABeast

2008-06-12T15:33:00.000-07:00

Collects two top "Storries" for its green storage products for fifth consecutive year

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif., June 9, 2008 – Nexsan, a leading provider of energy efficient, long term disk storage, collected top honours in two Green Storage categories at this year's Storage Industry Awards held at the Tower Hotel, London.

Nexsan's SATABeast disk-based fixed content storage product with AutoMAID was awarded the Green Product of the Year. AutoMAID is Nexsan's own enhancement of MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disk) technology that places disk drives into several levels of energy savings without compromising application performance. This powerful combination of high performance with energy saving capabilities enables users to lower the cost of owning storage.

In cooperation with Channel partner NCE Computer Group, Nexsan also picked up the Green Project of the Year award as the storage backbone of an overall 100 TB plus solution provided to the Honda F1 racing team. Honda opted to consolidate its storage with virtualisation software operating in tandem with the Nexsan SATABeast and AutoMAID. The energy savings made possible by Nexsan's SATABeast with AutoMAID was a perfect fit with Honda's "myearthdream" campaign aimed at raising awareness of environmental issues.

The "Storrie" Awards are based on votes from readers of Storage Magazine, the UK's number one IT storage magazine.

"With these two ‘Storries', Nexsan has been recognized again as a leading innovator in green storage," said Bob Woolery, Senior Vice President, Marketing at Nexsan. "With a design focused on saving energy without compromising application performance, Nexsan products have moved beyond the "on or off" MAID implementations of other storage solutions, which can take several to many minutes to wake up, to offer several levels of energy savings enabling the disk system to be "on", save energy and maintain application performance."

Nexsan's latest innovation in green storage, the SASBoy the industry's first green SAS storage solution with MAID 2.0 was announced last week.

More on Nexsan's AutoMAID technology can be found at AutoMAID Energy Saving Technology BackupWorks.com

NAS remains simple and cost-effective

2008-06-06T16:00:00.000-07:00

One distinction between a NAS device and a traditional file server is the operating system. Traditional file servers use Novell NetWare, Linux, OS/2, Windows or Unix to offer file-based services out to the network. But file servers have other modules, code and features that do not directly relate to serving files. Because a NAS device is tuned for a specific function, it lacks other features, such as an application server or a directory server.
But even though NAS devices lack such features, NAS continues to gain in popularity because users like the concept of just plugging a device into their Ethernet network and having storage available a few minutes later. Companies such as NetApp and Snap Server by Adaptec took this one step further and created an "enterprise NAS" device, elevating NAS to a powerhouse of centralized file serving. An enterprise NAS uses external disk shelves, each containing 10 to 14 disks.
NAS systems have a credible, full-featured, performance-tuned operating environment and software stack geared toward serving up files to your networked computers. These systems also have features that allow non-Windows computers to attach to the shares like NFS and have added more and bigger networking ports, block-based storage, and 2 Gbps and 4 Gbps Fibre Channel interconnects.
Even though NAS is relatively easy to implement, storage administrator still need a healthy knowledge of the various NAS components, such as NAS interconnects, as well as NAS protocols. And with tight budgets all around, it's only prudent to make sure you get the biggest bang for your storage buck. Document what you need, plan ahead and build a solid RFP to present to the NAS vendors.

Nexsan Announces SASBoy, DATABeast and the Edge

2008-05-09T09:31:00.000-07:00

Nexsan’s product lines continue to expand, providing an even broader range of solutions to offer customers. These exciting New Nexsan products complement their popular and successful SATABoy and SATABeast.

NEW Nexsan Products
DATABeast - Full Service Storage for All Your Data
DATABeast combines enterprise class storage services with mission critical availability for today’s data intensive environments. DATABeast consolidates large amounts of SATABeasts into a single, high density, easy to manage solution that can be economically expanded to meet the needs of any organization.

SASBoy - High Performance SAS Storage
Nexsan has raised the bar again with its SASBoy high performance SAS storage. The SASBoy’s unique combination of high performance with energy saving sets it apart enabling organizations to maximize the use of their investment while reducing cost of operation.

The Edge - Full Featured NAS & iSCSI for SASBoy, SATABoy and SATABeast
Nexsan has added NAS/NFS-CIFS and additional iSCSI storage services to our award winning storage systems. Additional features include online capacity expansion, replication, snapshots and Assureon CAS archive connectivity software for those customers needing archive and compliance. It’s the perfect solution for small to medium sized businesses with files and databases wanting to consolidate everything onto a single, easy to use Nexsan solution.

SATABeast Xi - Designed for Xserve and Mac Pro Systems
If you didn’t see it before, Nexsan has taken its award-winning SATABeast storage system and redesigned it for Mac environments.

Arcmail Tecnology - Importance of Email Archiving

2008-04-18T13:04:00.000-07:00

The Growing Need to Archive Email

‘Email archiving’ is one of those terms that evokes a variety of responses from messaging managers. Individuals in heavily regulated companies, such as broker-dealers, see it as a critical element of good messaging management in order to satisfy regulatory requirements. Others see it as a ‘nice to have’ feature that might provide some additional value to their organization. Still others see it as undesirable because of the potential for preserving incriminating evidence that could harm an organization during a legal action or regulatory audit. This white paper is intended to address all three groups. Its goal is to help you understand the wisdom of at leastconsidering the deployment of an email archiving system. The white paper discusses the various benefits that such a system can provide and why archiving email for long periods can provide more benefits than detriments for just about any organization. This white paper also discusses the value proposition offered by ArcMail Technology, providers of an appliance-based email archiving system that is designed for organizations of up to 5,000 users.

Why Organizations Should Consider Archiving

There are a variety of reasons that any organization should consider deploying an email archiving system. In some organizations, one reason will suffice; in others, there will need to be a combination of benefits to help sell the notion that email archiving is a best practice and a sound business decision.

Regulatory Compliance

There is a mindset among many messaging managers and other decision makers that there are ‘regulated’ and ‘unregulated’ industries. Regulated industries would include broker-dealers and others who deal in securities trading, since these organizations face stringent requirements; while unregulated industries would include virtually everyone else. That is clearly not the case. In reality, there are heavily regulated industries, such as broker-dealers and investment advisors, and less heavily regulated, which includes just about everyone else. Virtually all employers in all industries face varying degrees of regulation. For example:

Broker-dealers must comply with a variety of retention and supervisory regulations, including SEC Rules 17a-3 and 17a-4; NASD Rules 2210 and 3110; NYSE Rules 440, 342 and 472; and NFA Rule 2-9.
Registered investment advisors must comply with new email retention provisions of Rule 204-2 contained in the Investment Advisers Act.
The Investment Dealers Association of Canada imposes email retention and supervisory requirements on Canadian investment dealers through IDA By-law 29.7.
Other data retention requirements focused on the financial services space include NCUA Part 749, 12 CFR 226.25, 17 CFR 270, 17 CFR 275 and 17 CFR 240.
Large, public companies face regulatory requirements from statutes like Sarbanes-Oxley, specifically Sections 404 and 802.
Organizations that manage healthcare-related information must satisfy statutes like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Medicare Conditions of Participation. Further, Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement to rural health clinics requires that these clinics maintain medical records for six years.
Contractors to the US federal government must satisfy provisions of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR).
Almost all organizations, depending on the jurisdiction(s) in which they operate, are subject to regulations like the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, California’s SB 1386, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Patriot Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (Canada), to name but a few of the many regulations that include data retention provisions. The consequences of failing to comply with data retention regulations, as well as legal discovery requirements (as discussed later in this document), can be severe. Consider the following:
Ronald Perelman sued Morgan Stanley in a case in which Perelman alleged that Morgan Stanley did not uncover fraud at appliance maker Sunbeam. Because Morgan Stanley did not provide to the court emails that it was ordered to produce, the judge in the case told the jury that Morgan Stanley’s failure to produce the emails was ‘an act of bad faith’ – Perelman won a $1.7 billion judgement. Further, in February 2006, the SEC fined Morgan Stanley $15 million because of their inability to produce the required emails in this case.

In March of 2004, Bank of America was fined $10 million by the SEC for failure to a) continue to retain email records regarding a recent merger and b) for taking too long to comply with regulatory requests. The SEC charged that Bank of America misled regulators and took too long to produce evidence in an investigation of improper trading by employees at its securities brokerage. The bank complained that it would be “too much work” to produce certain archived emails – it took the bank nearly two years to produce all of the emails that had been requested.

In December 2002, Salomon Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley, Piper Jaffrey & Hopwood, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs were fined a total of $8.25 million because of their failure to adhere to SEC Rule 17a-4 which requires broker-dealers to preserve electronic data on non-rewritable, non-erasable storage. While most of the regulations that include provisions for data retention do not specifically require email retention, there are two important things to consider in this regard. First, the increasing proportion of corporate records that are sent through and stored in email necessitates an archival capability that can manage records in this native format – printing copies of email for retention is unwieldy, prone to error and very expensive. Second, email constitutes a written communication that carries the same formality and weight of a certified letter. It is important, therefore, that organizations of all sizes and
in all industries assess their regulatory requirements with regard to the preservation of email. These requirements exist at the Federal and state levels and, in some cases, at the county or city level. Also, the various countries in which an organization operates typically impose some level of record retention requirements with which organizations must comply.

Legal Discovery and Litigation Support

From a legal standpoint, data retention is an increasingly important component of a good messaging management strategy for one simple reason: email is increasingly included in legal discovery orders. Courts are increasingly finding that email contains valuable content that can be of value in legal discovery proceedings. Further, the case of Zubulake vs. Warburg has become the ‘gold standard’ in legal discovery arguments, since the case makes it more likely that a defendant will have to bear the costs associated with legal discovery if a plaintiff can demonstrate that an email system contains information that is likely to be valuable.

For an organization that must produce information from its email system during legal discovery, the primary value that an archiving system can offer is a dramatic reduction in the cost of this activity. An organization faced with the cost of satisfying a legal discovery order using nothing but backup tapes faces potentially major costs to satisfy the order. Because recovery servers must be set up, the contents of backup tapes read into live storage, and then the requested information must be found, the process of discovery can be time-consuming, extremely expensive and disruptive to IT staff members who typically must stop other activities to perform this work. An email archiving system can dramatically shorten the amount of time required for legal discovery and can cut the costs of discovery to just a fraction of what they would be otherwise.

Another issue to consider is the potentially severe consequence of not being able to produce email in a timely fashion in response to a discovery order. Emails that cannot be produced in response to such an order may be presumed to be incriminating – the Perlman case noted above is an example of the type of inference that may be drawn by a judge and jury from such an inability to satisfy a discovery order.

In addition to legal discovery, an email archiving system can assist an organization in assessing its position at the beginning of a legal action. An organization faced with a wrongful termination lawsuit, for example, can quickly go through an archive for all emails and other information that might be relevant. If the organization finds that its position is untenable, the organization’s legal counsel can push for a quick settlement in order to minimize its losses. If, on theother hand, an examination of the archive reveals that the lawsuit is without merit, it can leverage this knowledge, as well.

From a legal perspective, one of the arguments against email archiving is that it preserves ‘smoking guns’ that could serve to harm an organization during a regulatory audit or legal discovery. Many believe that deleting all email on a regular basis can insulate an organization from liability by removing potentially incriminating evidence that might be introduced during a legal action, for example. However, there are two arguments against deleting email as a means of protecting an organization:

Deleted email is never completely deleted. While your organization may delete all copies of email, external recipients of email still likely have copies of it stored in their archives, on backup tapes, or in local .PST files. Employees likely have copies of email on their laptops, PDAs, home computers, USB keychain devices, etc. In short, while email can be deleted from servers and backup tapes, there are many other locations in which copies may be found.
Deleting email on a regular basis is no guarantee that an organization will not be held liable for producing email during a regulatory audit or during discovery.

Storage Management and Storage Optimization

Most organizations impose mailbox size quotas in order to ensure a good compromise between email server performance and usable mailbox sizes for end users. Osterman Research has found that the median mailbox size among organizations that impose such quotas is 100 megabytes. If mailbox sizes are allowed to grow larger, email server efficiency can suffer, message delivery times can slow and restoration after a server crash can take longer. If quotas are made smaller, users will spend more time cleaning out their mailbox in order to stay within their quota limitation, reducing their productivity.

An appropriately configured email archiving system can automatically move content from users’ mailboxes to the archive while still making it available to users on a long term basis. From an operational standpoint, then, an email archive can provide the best of both worlds: IT can impose fairly strict quota limitations in order to maintain optimal email server performance, while users can employ a mailbox that appears to be infinitely large because content is automatically archived.

Knowledge Management

Osterman Research has found that the typical email user spends about one-third of his or her day using some aspect of an email system: sending and receiving emails, looking for attachments, creating or looking up contacts, managing tasks and so forth. Coupled with the fact that email systems have become the primary file transport mechanism and repository for most organizations, there is, therefore, an enormous quantity of information stored in email systems that users can employ in doing their work. Osterman Research has found that more than 90% of email users refer to old email when composing new email.

An email archiving system can serve as an effective knowledge management tool by making older email content available to users through an easy-to-use search interface. While knowledge management is unlikely to be the primary reason that an organization implements email archiving, it is an important additional benefit that an organization can realize.

Disaster Recovery

It almost goes without saying that disasters happen. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes – as well as the odd leaky water pipe above a server room – can all render an email system inoperable. While backup tapes are useful in bringing an email system back online, perhaps using a secondary set of servers at another location, there can still be substantial data loss incurred. For example, if an email server goes down due to some sort of serious problem at 4:00pm on a Wednesday afternoon, typically the most recent backup tape that would be available would be one from the night before, resulting in a loss of all email data generated by employees on that Wednesday. An email archiving system, on the other hand, can be configured to archive data in near real-time, resulting in comparatively little data loss.

The ArcMail Technology Value Proposition

ArcMail Technology’s Defender is a self-contained appliance that provides a complete archiving solution for organizations of up to 5,000 users. The appliance is easy to deploy and manage, and provides a complete archiving solution that satisfies the requirements discussed above:

Compliance

Defender fulfills the message storage requirements of the various regulations noted above. Data is stored with MD5 identification, an encryption algorithm designed to verify the integrity of data, to guarantee that the data has not been modified.

Legal discovery

Defender can quickly produce all related documents. Often, showing the context in which an email was written can refute a single apparently damaging email taken out of context.

Storage management

With access to an extremely large archive, users no longer need to tie up large amounts of storage on their desktops or the company mail server(s).

Knowledge management

Defender offers an easy-to-use interface that allows users to rapidly identify and recover messages. Users may retrieve their messages from their own archive, reducing the need for IT staff to be involved in recovering deleted or missing emails. Defender also provides a number of other benefits, including:

A very affordable archiving capability that can be deployed for as little as $10 per user.

Real-time archiving, not batch archiving. This is extremely important in the context of regulatory and legal compliance, since a batch archiving system allows users to delete email between archiving cycles.

Non-intrusive archiving that imposes no requirement on individual users to identify the records that need to be retained and those that can safely be deleted.
An ‘edge’ form factor, completely independent of the email server, so that mail server performance is unaffected by archiving operations.
The ability to restore email content to a newly created mailbox so that individual users can be investigated independently of their normal day-to-day use of email.
On-line search capablities, including email and mailbox restoration, eliminating the need for tape-based systems.
Protection of intellectual property through both outbound content filtering and supervisory search capabilities.
Defender serves as the basis for a robust disaster recovery and business continuity solution

Summary and Conclusion

Email archiving is a critical component of an overall messaging management capability that can provide a number of important benefits for organizations of all sizes in all industries. Among these benefits are:

Regulatory compliance
Legal discovery and litigation support
Storage management and storage optimization
Knowledge management
Disaster recovery

For smaller organizations, an easy-to-deploy email archiving solution is an important tool that can reduce an organization’s costs, make it more responsive to information requests during regulatory audits or legal discovery, make its email servers more efficient and make its users more productive.

Storage Area Network Basics! SAN Management Overview

2008-04-14T09:56:00.000-07:00

The storage area network (SAN) centralizes enterprise storage by interconnecting storage devices and subsystems through a dedicated high-speed network fabric, such as Fibre Channel, FICON OR ESCON. A SAN can also extend beyond the local data center, connecting storage systems at remote geographic locations through WAN links like ATM or SONET. Once implemented and configured, the SAN's storage resources can be managed centrally, allowing administrators to organize, provision and allocate that storage to users or applications operating on the network across an organization. Centralization also allows administrators to monitor performance, troubleshoot problems and manage the demands of storage growth. If you're new to storage area network technology, or just need to refresh the basics, this guide covers the essential concepts of configuration, provisioning, performance and capacity management, and monitoring and troubleshooting. SAN hardware leaders include StoreVault, Snap Server 700i Series and the Nexsan Technologies Company.

RAID configuration
RAID technology serves two purposes in the disk array or server; it can be used to improve storage I/O performance through striping, and it can bring redundancy to the RAID group through mirroring and parity techniques. When implementing RAID, it's necessary to select an appropriate RAID level and specify a RAID group size (the number of disks committed to the group). For example, use RAID 1 when top performance is essential. This mirrors the contents of one disk to another but uses twice the number of disks. Other RAID levels protect disk groups by striping parity information across each disk in the group. RAID 5 uses one additional disk for parity data, while RAID 6 uses two extra disks, allowing the loss of two drives simultaneously. RAID 6 has become more prominent in recent years due to the popularity of SATA drives, which are high-capacity drives that take longer to rebuild.

Rebuild time is a serious issue when configuring RAID arrays. When a disk fails, it takes time to rebuild the failed disk's contents. During a rebuild, the RAID group is inaccessible or operates at reduced performance. But as disk capacities have burgeoned, rebuild times have become problematic. Now that SATA disks are routinely at 750 GB with 1 TB drives available, failures can take hours to rebuild. Such long rebuilds expose the RAID array to a greater potential for multiple disk failures and data loss. Look for disk arrays that offer fast rebuild times and predictive fault features that can start a rebuild to a spare disk before a complete disk failure occurs.
Another issue comes in changes to the RAID setup. Traditionally, a RAID group was a static entity once a level and group were selected. To change a RAID level or group size, the group would have to be rebuilt from scratch using the new size and level, and then reloaded from a backup. An increasing number of RAID platforms support dynamic RAID groups, allowing administrators to change levels and group sizes on the fly.

SAN provisioning
To centralize storage on a SAN while restricting access to authorized users or applications; the entire storage environment should not be accessible to every user. Administrators must carve up the storage space into segments that are only accessible to specific users. This management process is known as provisioning. For example, some amount of data center storage may be provisioned for an Oracle database that might only be accessible to a purchasing department, while other space may be apportioned for personnel records accessible to the human resources department.

The major challenge with provisioning relates to storage utilization. Once space is allocated, it cannot easily be changed. Thus, administrators typically provision ample space for an application's future use. Unfortunately, storage capacity that is provisioned for one application cannot be used by another, so space that is allocated, but unused, is basically wasted until called for by the application. This need to allocate for future expansion often leads to significant storage waste on the storage area network. One way to alleviate this problem is through thin provisioning, which essentially allows an administrator to "tell" an application that some amount of storage is available but actually commit far less drive space -- expanding that storage in later increments as the application's needs increase.

Provisioning is accomplished through the use of software tools. Tools typically accompany major storage products. For example, EMC's Celerra NAS family includes Celerra Manager software for provisioning. The issue for administrators is to seek a provisioning tool that offers heterogeneous support that covers the storage platforms currently in their environment. Otherwise, IT staff will need to use multiple provisioning tools, increasing management difficulty.
SAN performance and capacity management
SAN performance can be adversely affected when storage runs low, resulting in application performance problems and service level issues. Many IT organizations guard against this threat by overbuying and overprovisioning storage, but this frequently results in wasted capital since the additional storage investment is not necessarily utilized. Organizations are embracing performance and capacity planning practices to avoid unexpected storage costs and disruptive upgrades. The goal is to predict storage needs over time and then budget capital and labor to make regular improvements to the storage infrastructure.

In actual practice, SAN performance and capacity planning can be extremely difficult. It's virtually impossible to predict the storage needs of an application or department over time without a careful assessment of past growth and a comprehensive evaluation of future plans. In fact, many organizations forego the expense and effort of a formal process unless a mission-critical project or serious performance problem demands it. Organizations choosing to sustain an ongoing performance and capacity planning effort will need either comprehensive storage resource management (SRM)-type tools, or a capacity planning application.

SAN monitoring/troubleshooting
SAN problems can be particularly difficult to isolate -- further complicated by the complex configurations and interrelationships between the servers, switches and storage platforms that often populate a storage area network. A working SAN is a digital ecosystem unto itself and seemingly innocuous changes in one place can have a catastrophic impact on another.
The best SAN troubleshooting is typically proactive and usually involves establishing a performance baseline of critical characteristics before problems ever arise. It's then a simple matter to compare a current baseline against a "known good" baseline. This often reveals problems quickly and can identify any performance changes as the result of upgrades or reconfigurations.

Another key to effective SAN troubleshooting is comprehensive change management policies. By tracking changes and restricting change activities to authorized IT personnel, an administrator can avoid unexpected trouble and quickly correlate help requests with recent SAN changes.

Data Deduplication - Eases Storage Requirements

2008-03-25T14:19:00.000-07:00

Data is flooding the enterprise. Storage administrators are struggling to handle a spiraling volume of documents, audio, video and images, along with an alarming proliferation of large email attachments. Adding storage is not always the best solution; storage costs money and the sheer number of files eventually burdens the company’s backup and disaster recovery (DR) plans. Rather than finding ways to store more data, companies are turning to data reduction technologies such as data deduplication. This article explains the basic principles of data deduplication and looks at some of the implementation issues for data deduplication technology.

Understanding data deduplication

Data deduplication is a means of reducing storage space. It works by eliminating redundant data and ensuring that only one unique instance of the data is actually retained on storage media, such as disk or tape. Redundant data is replaced with a pointer to the unique data copy. Data deduplication, sometimes called intelligent compression or single-instance storage, is often used inconjunction with other forms of data reduction. Traditional compression has been around for about threedecades, applying mathematical algorithms to data in order to simplify large or repetitious parts of a file—effectively making a file smaller. Similarly, delta differencing reduces the total volume of stored data bycomparing the new and old iteration of a file and saving only the data that had changed. Together, thesetechniques can optimize the use of storage space.

Benefits of data deduplication

When properly implemented, data deduplication lowers the amount of storage space required, which results in less disk expenditures. More efficient use of disk space also allows for longer disk retention periods, which offers better recovery time objective (RTO) for a longer time and reduces the need for tape backups. Data deduplication also reduces the data that must be sent across a WAN for remote backups, replication and disaster recovery. Data deduplication primarily operates at the file, block and even the bit levels. File deduplication is relatively easy to understand: If two files are exactly alike, one copy of the file is stored and subsequent iterations receive pointers to the saved file. However, file deduplication is not very efficient because the change of even a single bit results in a totally different copy of the entire file being stored. By comparison, block and bit deduplication looks within a file and saves unique iterations of each block. If a file is updated, only the changed data is saved. This behavior makes block and bit deduplication far more efficient. “It’s an order of magnitude difference in terms of the amount of storage that it [block deduplication] saves in a typical environment,” says W. Curtis Preston, vice president of data protection at GlassHouse Technologies Inc. Other analysts note that deduplication can achieve compression ratios ranging from 10-to-1 to 50-to-1. However, block and bit deduplication take more processing power and use much larger index to track the individual blocks. Data deduplication platforms must contend with the issue of “hash collisions.” Each chunk of data is processed using a hash algorithm, such as MD5 or SHA-1, generating a unique number for each piece. The resulting hash number is then compared with an index of the existing hash numbers. If that hash number is already in the index, the piece of data is a duplicate and does not need to be stored again. Otherwise, the new hash number is added to the index and the new data is stored. In rare cases, the hash algorithm may produce the same hash number for two different chunks of data. When such a hash collision occurs, the system fails to store the new data because it sees that hash number already. This is called a false positive and can result in data loss. Some vendors combine hash algorithms to reduce the possibility of a hash collision. Some vendors are also examining metadata to identify data and prevent collisions.

Implementing data deduplication

The data deduplication process is usually implemented in hardware within the actual storage system, but it is also appearing in backup software. Hardware-based implementations are usually easier to deploy and are geared to reducing storage at the disk level within the appliance or storage system. Software-based implementations also reduce data, but the reduction is performed at the backup server. This minimizes the bandwidth between the backup server and backup system, which is particularly handy if the backup system is located remotely. “Users get end-to-end benefits when deduplicating data at the source—less data traverses the WAN, LAN and SAN,” However, deploying deduplication in a new backup application is more disruptive because it involves installing lightweight agents on the systems that must be backed up, in addition to installing the new backup engine.

Caveats regarding data deduplication

There is no universal approach to data deduplication; results can vary dramatically, depending on factors such as the storage environment and, of course, which dedupe product is selected. Data deduplication only makes sense when long-term retention is involved, usually for backup and archive tasks. Short-term retention sees little benefit because there is nothing to deduplicate against. Preston cautions against the misinformation circulating between deduplication vendors and suggests focusing on issues of performance, capacity and cost. With due diligence, you can identify potential performance and compression issues in your environment. “Let’s say you’re backing up seismic data or medical imaging data—this data tends to not dedupe very well,” he says. He also advices users to test a prospective data deduplication platform with various types of backups and restores, and see how it functions under actual circumstances. Scalability is another issue for data deduplication deployment, especially in terms of performance as the data deduplication system grows. Performance might have been an issue as early hash indexes grew large and additional time was needed to look up each block, but Preston calls that FUD (fouled up data) marketing now. “All of the vendors that I am aware of that are currently shipping or about to ship have addressed this [scaling issue] in one way or another,” he says. Nevertheless, he recommends you check with you data deduplication vendor on the matter. From a management perspective, data deduplication should not present any noticeable increase in overhead. “It [management] shouldn’t be any more or less than just a standard VTL [virtual tape library].” When multiple deduplication devices are needed, however, there could be an incremental increase in management effort.

Impact of data deduplication

The Appalachian and coastal areas South Carolina are enticing attractions to tourists and regional industry. Advertising, communication and literature have emerged as key assets to the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism—the agency responsible for promoting tourism as an industry and maintaining an extensive park system throughout the state. The agency originally had an EMC Corp. storage area network (SAN) hosting a total of 4 terabytes (TB), of which 1.2 TB comprised the actual working data set of databases and files, while 2 TB was allocated for disk backups before being relegated to DLT. Like many IT organizations, the agency sought ways to mitigate the increasing storage demands of its media and other data. After investigating numerous data deduplication vendors, the agency settled on Data Domain Inc.’s 430 appliance for disk backup tasks. With 2 TB of onboard storage, the 430 replaced the 2 TB that had previously been set aside on the SAN. The reduction in space was dramatic with bit level deduplication. “With the compression and deduplication, I think we’re using about 900 MB,” says Bernie Robichau, the agency’s systems administrator and security officer. The space reduction was a welcome cost savings, but it also allowed much longer backup retention on disk. “If someone had requested a two-week old file, I would have never been able to get that from a disk-based backup because I couldn’t keep two sets of backups on our allocated 2 TB of hard drive [SAN] storage,” Robichau notes. “Now someone can request a file from three weeks ago or six weeks ago, and it’s immediately available.” Robichau says that installation of the data deduplication platform was relatively quick and easy, requiring only about four hours of onsite engineering work and minimal configuration. Its current CommVault System Inc. backup infrastructure proved to be fully compatible—backup agents were simply pointed to the new appliance rather than the EMC SAN. “The backups worked just as they always did, but we’re consuming far less disk space and much more retention than we ever did before,” he says. While the deduplication appliance requires almost no management time, Robichau notes as much as 75% labor savings in tape overhead, such as cartridge rotation, cleaning and storage. The only remaining tape effort involves full backups on weekends and systematic cartridge rotation to an offsite location. Although there are no immediate plans to upgrade storage on the 430 appliance, the attention is clearly focused on disaster recovery. Previous considerations of complex disaster recovery plans were put on hold due to complexity. However, the 430 supports replication easily and Robichau expects to replicate the 430 to a duplicate appliance and eliminate backup tapes entirely sometime in the next fiscal year or beyond. “There’s no planning beyond synchronizing an identical appliance on site and putting it in one of our remote locations.”
Denver-based IT hosting provider was drowning in customer data. Its challenge: to keep its data protection business running smoothly, along with other services, like managed server hosting, managed firewalls and load balancing. However, its backup environment was formidable; handling 20,000 backups per month with each customer protecting 20 GB to100 GB. Even with 4.5 TB of protected storage, They could only keep two weeks of retention. To make matters even more challenging, its StorageTek L700 and L11000 tape libraries were managed by an outsourced provider, requiring a full-time engineer at the hosting provider. But, it was ongoing restoration problems that forced them into action. “Our success rate from backups, at the lowest point, was roughly 70%,” says senior systems engineer. “And far too often, we couldn’t hit [restore] the exact day they wanted.” Poor performance of the tape backup process also plagued the organization, with full backup windows often exceeding 18 hours. These problems also translated into significant customer support costs. It became clear to him that disk storage was the key to beating reliability and performance woes, and data deduplication would be essential to reduce the total volume of storage needed for full and incremental customer backups. They opted for Avamar Technologies’ Axion software running on a cluster of 11 Dell 2850s offering about 10 TB of total storage. The actual deployment involved a forklift upgrade, but he reportsthat the system was up and running in just a few days after installing agents on almost 400 backup servers and migrating necessary data.

The move to data deduplication brought several significant benefits, most notably a reduction in storage requirements. While it might have taken 350 GB to protect 100 GB of customer data without deduplication (full and incremental backups), with data deduplication, it actually takes less storage than the data it’s protecting. “I’m using about 7 TB of storage to protect roughly 8 TB of data,” he says. “That includes anywhere from two weeks to one year of retention [daily full backups].” Backup time was also slashed; in some cases an 18-hour backup window fell to 1-1/2 hours, while the backup and restoration success rate was improved to 98% or more. Before, two full-time engineers were needed. After the deployment, that requirement fell to one half-time engineer. “We wanted to have an ROI [return on investment] of 24 months, and we hit payback at 20 months,”.

Today, the 4.5 TB of protected data has grown to about 7.6 TB protected by data deduplication. About 2 TB of that protected data is replicated to a smaller Avamar deployment at a disaster recovery site in St. Louis. The company continues to use tape for long-term archival backups. He expects the amount of protected data to double in the foreseeable future, though less storage will be required to handle the growth.

The future of data deduplication

In the near term, industry experts see data deduplication filling an important role in disaster recovery: saving disk storage space by replicating the data of one deduplication platform to another located off site. This reduces the need to move tapes back and forth, which can be particularly valuable when replicating hundreds of terabytes of data. Other analysts note that the separate “point products,” like VTL, will address backup window performance, while data deduplication addresses the issue of storage capacity. Whitehouse says, “Next-generation backup solutions fix both, deduplicating data as it’s sourced from the backup target and improving the efficiency of its transfer across a LAN/WAN to the central disk repository.” Deduplication is now common in VTLs and will appear as a feature of traditional backup products.

Key considerations in developing a storage area network design

2008-03-18T15:58:00.000-07:00

Storage area networks (SANs) let several servers share storage resources and are often used in situations that require high performance or shared storage with block-level access, like virtualized servers and clustered databases. Although SANs started out as a high-end technology used only in large enterprises, cheaper SANs are now affordable even for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). In earlier installments of this Hot Spot Tutorial, we examined what benefits SANs offer over other storage architectural choices, as well as the two main storage networking protocols, Fibre Channel and iSCSI. In this installment, we'll look at the main considerations you should keep in mind when putting together a storage area network design.

Uptime and availability
Because several servers will rely on a SAN for all of their data, it's important to make the system very reliable and eliminate any single points of failure. Most SAN hardware vendors offer redundancy within each unit -- like dual power supplies, internal controllers and emergency batteries -- but you should make sure that redundancy extends all the way to the server.
In a typical storage area network design, each storage device connects to a switch that then connects to the servers that need to access the data. To make sure this path isn't a point of failure, your client should buy two switches for the SAN network. Each storage unit should connect to both switches, as should each server. If either path fails, software can fail over to the other. Some programs will handle that failover automatically, but cheaper software may require you to enable the failover manually. You can also configure the program to use both paths if they're available, for load balancing.
But you should also consider how the drives themselves are configured, Franco said. RAID technology spreads data among several disks -- a technique called striping -- and can add parity checks so that if any one disk fails, its content can be rebuilt from the others. There are several types of RAID, but the most common in SAN designs are levels 5, 6 and 1+0.
RAID 5 stripes data across every disk in the unit except one, which is used to store parity information that can be used to rebuild any drive that needs to be replaced. RAID 6 adds a second disk for redundant parity. This protects your client's data in case a second drive breaks during the first disk's rebuild, which can take up to 24 hours for a terabyte, Franco said. RAID 1+0 stripes data across a series of disks without any parity checks, which is very fast, but mirrors each of those disks to a second set of striped disks for redundancy.

Capacity and scalability
A good storage area network design should not only accommodate your client's current storage needs, but it should also be scalable so that your client can upgrade the SAN as needed throughout the expected lifespan of the system. You should consider how scalable the SAN is in terms of storage capacity, number of devices it supports and speed.
Because a SAN's switch connects storage devices on one side and servers on the other, its number of ports can affect both storage capacity and speed, Schulz said. By allowing enough ports to support multiple, simultaneous connections to each server, switches can multiply the bandwidth to servers. On the storage device side, you should make sure you have enough ports for redundant connections to existing storage units, as well as units your client may want to add later.
One feature of storage area network design that you should consider is thin provisioning of storage. Thin provisioning tricks servers into thinking a given volume within a SAN, known as a logical unit number (LUN), has more space than it physically does. For instance, an operating system (OS) that connects to a given LUN may think the LUN is 2 TB, even though you have only allocated 250 GB of physical storage for it.
Thin provisioning allows you to plan for future growth without your client having to buy all of its expected storage hardware up front. In a typical "fat provisioning" model, each LUN's capacity corresponds to physical storage. That means that your client will have to buy as much space as it anticipates needing for the next few years. While it's possible to allocate a smaller amount of space for now and transfer its data to a larger provision as needed, that process is slow and could result in downtime for your client.
Thin provisioning allows you to essentially overbook a SAN's storage, promising a total capacity to the LUNs that is greater than the SAN physically has. As those LUNs fill up and start to reach the system's physical capacity, you can add more units to the SAN -- often in a hot-swappable way. But because this approach to storage area network design requires more maintenance down the road, it's best for stable environments where a client can fairly accurately predict how each LUN's storage needs will grow.

Security
With several servers able to share the same physical hardware, it should be no surprise that security plays an important role in a storage area network design. Your client will want to know that servers can only access data if they're specifically allowed to. If your client is using iSCSI, which runs on a standard Ethernet network, it's also crucial to make sure outside parties won't be able to hack into the network and have raw access to the SAN.
Most of this security work is done at the SAN's switch level. Zoning allows you to give only specific servers access to certain LUNs, much as a firewall allows communication on specific ports for a given IP address. If any outward-facing application needs to access the SAN, like a website, you should configure the switch so that only that server's IP address can access it.
If your client is using virtual servers, the storage area network design will also need to make sure that each virtual machine (VM) has access only to its LUNs. Virtualization complicates SAN security because you cannot limit access to LUNs by physical controllers anymore -- a given controller on a physical server may now be working for several VMs, each with its own permissions. To restrict each server to only its LUNs, set up a virtual adapter for each virtual server. This will let your physical adapter present itself as a different adapter for each VM, with access to only those LUNs that the virtualized server should see.

Replication and disaster recovery
With so much data stored on a SAN, your client will likely want you to build disaster recovery into the system. SANs can be set up to automatically mirror data to another site, which could be a failsafe SAN a few meters away or a disaster recovery (DR) site hundreds or thousands of miles away.
If your client wants to build mirroring into the storage area network design, one of the first considerations is whether to replicate synchronously or asynchronously. Synchronous mirroring means that as data is written to the primary SAN, each change is sent to the secondary and must be acknowledged before the next write can happen.
While this ensures that both SANs are true mirrors, synchronization introduces a bottleneck. If the secondary site has a latency as high as even 100 to 200 milliseconds (msec), your system will slow down as the primary SAN has to wait for each confirmation. Although there are other factors, latency is often related to distance; synchronous replication is generally possible up to about 6 miles.
The alternative is to asynchronously mirror changes to the secondary site. You can configure this replication to happen as quickly as every second, or every few minutes or hours. While this means that your client could permanently lose some data, if the primary SAN goes down before it has a chance to copy its data to the secondary, your client should make calculations based on its recovery point objective (RPO) to determine how often it needs to mirror.

Disk users looking to add Tape back into their storage infastructure

2008-03-12T14:39:00.000-07:00

OVER TWO THIRDS OF DISK-ONLY USERS LOOK TO ADD TAPE BACK INTO STORAGE INFRASTRUCTURE ACCORDING TO RECENT SURVEY

Survey Data Suggests that Most Companies Surveyed Are Migrating to a Tiered Storage Infrastructure of Disk and Tape Deployments

SILICON VALLEY, CALIF. — (March 12, 2008) — HP, IBM Corporation and Quantum Corporation, the three technology provider companies for the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Program today released survey results that strongly suggest that storage customers that use a disk-only infrastructure are now looking at tape storage technology as part of a tiered storage infrastructure to support backup and archiving. Over two thirds of surveyed businesses said they were looking to add tape storage back into their overall network infrastructure and of those respondents, over 80-percent plan to add tape storage solutions within the next 12 months.

The survey, which was taken in the fourth quarter of 2007, focused on the views of more than 200 network administrators and mid-level tech specialists at mid-size to large companies throughout the United States.

"The integration of tape storage into a tiered information infrastructure is highly strategic for customers, due to its low cost of ownership, low energy consumption and portability for data protection," said Cindy Grossman, Vice President of Tape Storage Systems, IBM. "LTO tape technology is a perfect choice for enterprise and mid-sized customer with its proven reliability, high capacity, high performance and ability to address data security with built-in encryption and data retention requirements for the evolving data center."

According to the survey, 58-percent of the respondents use a combination of disk and tape for long term archiving, 24 percent use tape exclusively, and 18-percent employ a disk-only approach. In this group, 68-percent of the current disk only users plan to start using tape for long-term archiving, and over half (58-percent) plan to add tape for short-term data protection.

"The survey findings suggest that disk-only users may be experiencing a bit of buyer’s remorse," said David Geddes, senior vice president at Fleishman-Hillard Research, who oversaw the study. "We found that a wide majority of companies that employ purely disk-based approaches are looking to quickly include tape in their backup and archiving strategies.

LTO tape technology delivers the backup and archiving features needed by today’s storage administrators, including high capacity, blazing performance, 256-bit drive-level encryption for data security and WORM cartridge support to address data retention needs. With low energy consumption, tape technology can also provide organizations with a green alternative for the data center. Studies have shown that tape-based backup and archiving solutions can deliver substantial TCO benefits and energy savings

The LTO format is a powerful, scalable, adaptable open tape format developed and continuously enhanced by technology providers HP, IBM Corporation and Quantum Corporation (and their predecessors) to help address the growing demands of data protection in the midrange to enterprise-class server environments. This ultra-high capacity generation of tape storage products is designed to deliver outstanding performance, capacity and reliability combining the advantages of linear multi-channel, bi-directional formats with enhancements in servo technology, data compression, track layout, and error correction.

The LTO Ultrium format has a well-defined roadmap for growth and scalability.

Yoggie Introduces the Firestick Pico Hardware Firewall

2008-02-22T15:05:00.001-08:00

Yoggie Security Systems Introduces "Firestick Pico" Hardware Firewall
Ultra-Portable USB Device Protects PCs from Broadest Range of Attacks

LAS VEGAS, January 7, 2008 - Taking a page from its own miniaturization playbook, Yoggie Security SystemsTM (exhibiting at 2008 International CES in the Sands Convention Center, Innovation Pod #269) has introduced a unique, ultra-portable USB key-sized hardware-based firewall solution to protect PCs from malicious attacks.

The Firestick PicoTM places a physical barrier between PCs and the Internet to ensure that threats never reach users' computers. Unlike software firewalls, the fire red colored Firestick Pico mini-computer is based on a dedicated hardware platform specifically designed to protect PCs from the most devastating menaces including denial of service, buffer overflow and the broadest range of malicious attacks. It blocks all Internet threats and attacks outside - before they reach PCs or laptops.

The Firestick Pico is a complete Linux-based 300 MHz computer with a dual flash memory mechanism that constitutes an 'untouchable operating system' running an independent firewall application. In addition, each Firestick Pico comes with a complimentary Kaspersky security software suite.
"Yoggie's Firestick Pico brings another choice to end users," said Shlomo Touboul, CEO and founder of Yoggie Security Systems. "While our Gatekeeper Pico offloads all security applications from a PC, the Firestick Pico offloads just the firewall functionality at a much lower cost. This allows different levels of security and a range of price points for discerning buyers who are joining the Yoggie revolution: moving security applications from the PC to dedicated, miniature computers to enhance security and improve PC performance."

With Yoggie's Firestick Pico, road warriors can connect to any unsecured hotspot with the comfort of being completely protected.

About Yoggie Security Systems
Yoggie Security Systems™ established in 2005 by Shlomo Touboul – the inventor of Behavior Based Blocking Technology - is the developer of the world's first hardware-based computer security solution. Yoggie's range of USB key-sized security mini-computers connects to any PC or laptop at home, in the office and on the road - blocking Internet threats outside the host computer and boosting computer performance by off-loading installed security software. Yoggie's products combine best of breed security software with propriety patent-pending developments to provide the most comprehensive all-in-one security technology available to both consumers and corporate users.

Yoggie Security Systems Wins PC Magazines 2007 Technical Excellence Award

2008-02-22T14:59:00.000-08:00

Yoggie Security Systems Wins PC Magazine's 2007 Technical Excellence Award
Yoggie Pico Mini-Computer Honored in Security Category

NEW YORK, December 4, 2007 - Yoggie Security Systems™ has won PC Magazines's 2007 Technical Excellence Award for its Yoggie PicoTM, the world’s first hardware-based security solution for laptops and PCs that provides a suite of 12 security applications on a USB key-sized security mini-computer.

PC Magazine's 24th annual technical excellence awards, revealed today in the publication's December 4, 2007 cover issue, as well as online, recognize products, services and industry leaders that have improved the computing industry. The Yoggie Pico took top honors in the security category; winners were also selected in seven other categories - Storage, User Interface, Component, Software, Printing, Wireless and Person of the Year. Winners were selected by the magazine’s editorial staff.

"The Yoggie Pico is revolutionizing how people protect their computers, providing much more security in an easier to use and cost effective way. Using a unique hardware-based Internet security solution, the Yoggie Pico's USB key-sized Linux-based computer is packed with some of the toughest available security applications," said Shlomo Touboul, founder and CEO of Yoggie Security Systems. "It's gratifying that our innovative developments have been recognized by a publication as prestigious as PC Magazine."

By moving the software and the security burden to its own mini-computer, all Internet threats are blocked outside -- before they reach the PC -- and the PC regains resources enabling a performance boost. The Yoggie Pico has simplified "plug and forget" installation and operation, with no special technical knowledge required to produce a seamless security solution without pop-ups and update alerts.
In recent weeks, Yoggie Security Systems has been recognized by a host of other organizations and publications including CES Best of Innovations 2008 - Computer Accessories, Business Week/IDSA Silver Idea Award, Red Herring Global 100 Finalist, RSA 2007 Innovation Award and Network World's ‘Top Ten Security Companies to Watch.'

About Yoggie Security Systems
Yoggie Security Systems was established in 2005 by Shlomo Touboul, founder and former CEO of Finjan Software, and the inventor of Behavior Based Blocking Technology. As a result of countless meetings with IT managers around the world, Mr. Touboul realized they all share a common concern - while security technology has matured to provide robust security, traveling laptops create security holes that jeopardize the security of the entire corporate network. Mr. Touboul decided to dare the impossible, to try to miniaturize all the security appliances found in the corporate server room into a credit-card size device that can be easily carried and connected to the laptop.

The attempt was successful. After two years of intensive research, the world's first miniature security server was created. Putting all the security solutions into such a small device requires robust processing power, and indeed the Yoggie Gatekeeper is as strong as a full-blown Pentium III PC (520 MHz). But unlike a regular PC, it was designed as security hardware, with a hardened operating system and physical separation between the unsafe zone (Internet) and the safe zone (connected to the laptop). Yoggie solved the vulnerabilities of traveling laptops by effectively extending robust corporate security to the mobile and remote workforce. In addition to serving the corporate world, Yoggie security mini-computers are suitable for SMBs and home users.

2008-02-21T10:28:00.000-08:00

Removable Disk-Based Storage Comparison - Quantum GoVault and Imation Odyssey & RDX

Verdict: The GoVault offers cost-effective disk-based backup and combines this with a very clever backup utility.

As a small-business backup medium, tape is definitely on the defensive, as an increasing number of storage vendors are launching affordable hard disk-based alternatives. Tandberg Data's RDX QuickStor was the first, Imation followed next with its Odyssey, and now we have Quantum's GoVault.

But are disk-based backup solutions suitable for off-site storage, since tape has always been a prime candidate thanks to the robust media? Well, Quantum uses sturdy cartridges with 2.5in SATA hard disks mounted inside them. These look capable of withstanding punishment, and Quantum offers them in a range of capacities, with the review model including a 40GB cartridge. In terms of storage costs, Imation's Odyssey offers the best value, with Quantum's cartridges only slightly more costly. The QuickStor is the most expensive. However, you're limited to a USB interface for the Odyssey, whereas the GoVault is offered as an internal SATA model.

Initial installation is a cake-walk, as we just plugged the drive in and watched Windows load its standard drivers. We tested successfully under Vista and Server 2003 R2. At this stage, you can use the GoVault as a simple removable disk drive, format it and copy files to and from it. Installing the bundled application software adds a couple of extra features to the drive's right-click menu, where it allows you to mount it as a portable media device and password-protect cartridges.

Quantum's backup software makes the GoVault unique, as it incorporates de-duplication technology. This ensures multiple copies of data aren't present on the backup media, but the clever part is it does this at the block and not the file level. This level of sophistication isn't normally seen at the lower end of the backup market, with products such as EMC's Retrospect Express as bundled with the Odyssey only ensuring files aren't duplicated. The software is easy to use and you start by creating a data-protection plan that includes your local and networked source data, assigned cartridges and a schedule. You must assign cartridges to the plan, as the software maintains a record of them, will tell you which one to load for data restoration, and can manage a cartridge-rotation scheme for off-site storage.

The processes behind de-duplication are more involved, since the software uses algorithms to identify data blocks and ensure they're only stored once. This had an impact on the initial backup, where we saw 2GB of local test data take nearly nine minutes for a transfer rate of only 4MB/sec. It's worth the wait, though, as a glance at the smart reporting tools showed that de-duplication has reduced the space occupied to 1.1GB even though no actual files were duplicated. General performance is par for a USB device, with standard file copies using Explorer returning read and write rates of 20MB/sec and 19MB/sec respectively.

Disk-based backup solutions are becoming ever more popular, and Quantum's GoVault offers good value and a fair turn of speed, but it's the unique backup software and its de-duplication that really make it stand out.

LTO Announces Generation 5 Ultrium Format Technology Licenses

2008-02-21T10:10:00.000-08:00

LTO PROGRAM ANNOUNCES AVAILABILITY OF ULTRIUM FORMAT GENERATION 5 TECHNOLOGY
LICENSES

SILICON VALLEY, CALIF. — (January 24, 2008) — Continuing the support of their multi-generation roadmap, HP, IBM Corp. and Quantum Corp., the three technology provider companies (TPCs) for the Linear Tape-Open(LTO) Program, today announced the availability of enhanced package licenses for LTO Ultrium format Generation 5.

Subscribers to the new Generation 5 License will receive similar benefits of previous generation enhanced package licenses. In addition, the TPCs have provided for the ability of licensees to gain insight on the emerging tape specification through a series of regular discussions surrounding the specification development. This visibility into the specification is intended to help enhance licensees’ product development programs.

"LTO technology supports security, portability, high capacity and performance, and tape offers energy and cost savings for long term archiving," said Rob Clark, senior director, removable storage solutions for Quantum. "The availability of the new Generation 5 license is intended to help licensees provide their customers with the most advanced tape storage and data protection solutions."

Generation 5 is planned to boost storage physical capacity and transfer speeds over Generation 4 while continuing support for hardware-based encryption functionality as well as Write Once Read Many (WORM)
support to help address data security and compliance needs. The other class of LTO Ultrium Format license, the Specification Document License, is planned for public availability upon completion of the LTO Ultrium Generation 5
specification.

About Linear Tape-Open (LTO)

LTO format is a powerful, scalable, adaptable open tape format developed and continuously enhanced by technology providers HP, IBM Corporation and Quantum Corporation (and their predecessors) to help address the growing demands of data protection in the midrange to enterprise-class server environments. This ultra-high capacity generation of tape storage products is designed to deliver outstanding performance, capacity and reliability combining the advantages of linear multi-channel, bi-directional formats with enhancements in servo technology, data compression, track layout,
and error correction.

LTO media now available LTO-1, LTO-2, LTO-3 and LTO-4

LTO Tape Drives now available, LTO-1, LTO-2, LTO-3 and LTO-4

Adaptec Launches 700i Series of iSCSI Storage

2007-09-11T13:22:00.000-07:00

MILPITAS, Calif. – September 10, 2007 – Adaptec, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADPT), a global leader in trusted storage solutions, today announced the Snap Server 700i series of iSCSI storage appliances, which deliver 1 to 36TBs of easily expanded capacity using any combination of SAS and SATA drives. The 700i series sets new benchmarks for performance, price/performance, and scalability for medium-sized businesses looking to deploy an IP Storage Area Network (IP SAN) for their Linux, VMware, or Windows servers1. Synchronous mirroring between two Snap Server 700i series appliances with multi-pathing support for Windows servers provides maximum uptime for mission-critical applications such as Exchange, or SQL Server.

The Snap Server 700i series is comprised of three (3) 1U 19” rack-mount models, and leverages advanced Adaptec RAID technology for maximum performance and data protection. The Snap Server 720i provides 1TB or 2TBs using SATA drives. The Snap Server 730i provides 3TBs using SATA drives. The Snap Server 750i provides 1.2TB using 15K RPM SAS drives. Capacity can be added to any model by using 2U Adaptec SANbloc S50 expansion chassis, each of which houses any combination of up to 12 hot-swappable SATA or SAS drives.

“The Snap Server 700i series of iSCSI storage arrays from Adaptec provide an outstanding choice for Microsoft Exchange or SQL Server hosting,” said Jon Toigo, CEO of Toigo Partners International. “The Snap Server 730i that we tested provided excellent availability with synchronous mirroring and application consistent snapshots. With its excellent performance and competitive pricing, the Snap Server 700i series might just be the target to beat.”

For stand-alone or clustered Windows servers running mission-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, or Oracle database, two Snap Server 700i series appliances can be configured in a synchronous mirror and connected to the application servers through an IP SAN with redundant Ethernet cables and switches to ensure maximum uptime. Backups are accelerated when Microsoft VSS hardware snapshots stored in the 700i series are made available to a backup server on the IP SAN for fast backups without involving the application servers.

“The advantages are very compelling for IT professionals to move their storage from being isolated inside individual servers to residing in the Snap Server 700i series appliances,” explains Don Chouinard, Director of Product Management and Marketing for the Storage Solutions Group at Adaptec. “Server performance increases because I/O operations are spread across several disks. Reliability is enhanced through the use of RAID disk technology and redundant components such as power supplies and fans. And storage can be flexibly allocated to servers on the IP SAN without having to take the servers down.”

Early customer Total Quality Logistics (TQL), a leading freight shipping company, is currently deploying the new Snap Server 700i series to help achieve efficient utilization of resources and maintain optimal service availabilities. TQL supports nearly 1,000 employees and thousands of customers nationwide in facilitating over 180,000 truckload freight shipments annually.

“Cutting-edge technology is a fundamental component to our company’s continued success,” said John E Quigley II, senior network engineer at TQL. “I was not only impressed with the outstanding speed of the new Snap Server, but also how quickly and easily we were able to set it up. For a solution that offered such a wide range of management options, the initial configuration was very simple, and the interface clean and easy to navigate. As a result, we were able to attach servers literally within minutes, and they work great.”
Features and Benefits of the Snap Server 700i Series
Leading Performance and Value – Snap Server 700i series of storage appliances are powered by OnTarget OS, built upon the robust Linux operating system, and specifically tuned to deliver very high performance iSCSI storage using SAS and SATA drives, as well as enterprise-class features. The Snap Server 700i series competes with iSCSI storage appliances from leading competitors, delivering up to three times the performance, leading price/performance, and a rich set of bundled enterprise-class features.

Maximum Uptime – Storage reliability is delivered via RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 technology, as well as redundant hot-swappable power supplies and fans. The 700i series supports Microsoft clusters and delivers uptime for Windows servers via an MPIO DSM driver that runs on the Windows server to provide multi-pathing and load balancing. The Snap Server 700i series can be configured in a synchronous mirror, ensuring maximum uptime over non-mirrored configurations. Unlike competing products, the synchronous mirroring capability is bundled with each 700i series at no additional expense.
Flexible and Scalable– Users can easily add capacity to the 1U 19” rack mount Snap Server 700i series by using up to eight 2U Adaptec SANbloc S50 expansion chassis, each of which houses any combination of up to 12 hot-swappable SATA and SAS drives to optimize for either high capacity or high performance. Storage can then be flexibly allocated to servers and their storage capacity can be increased on the fly without having to take server applications down.

Easy to Manage – The Snap Server 700i series ships with automated, easy to follow set up wizards to significantly reduce deployment time. Snapshots can be scheduled to automatically provide application-consistent recovery points throughout the day. Unlike competing products, snapshot software is bundled with each model of the Snap Server 700i series at no additional expense.
Pricing and Availability
Snap Server 720i, 730i, and 750i are currently available through Adaptec resellers. Pricing for the Snap Server 720i (1TB SATA) starts at an estimated street price of $8,000, while the Snap Server 720i (2TB SATA) starts at an estimated street price of $9,600. The Snap Server 730i (3TB SATA) starts at an estimated street price of $13,400. And the Snap Server 750i (1.2TB SAS) starts at an estimated street price of $23,300