Overland Assigned Patent - Data protection systems with multiple site replication

Overland Storage, Inc., San Diego, CA, as been assigned a patent (8,386,705) developed by four co-inventors for a "data protection systems with multiple site replication."

The co-inventors are Dennis Desimone, Michael H. Reider, Escondido, CA, Kenneth Geist, San Diego, and Victoria Gonzalez, Escondido, CA.
 
The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "Systems and methods for replicating data from a first site to a second site remote from said first site are described. An embodiment includes storing compressed data on a HDD appliance, reading said data without decompressing said data, sending said data over a wide-area-network (WAN) in a compressed state, and storing said data on a second HDD appliance remote from said first HDD appliance in its compressed state without performing an additional compression operation."

LTO Program Announces LTFS Compliance Verification Testing

Test costs $10,000.

The Linear Tape-Open Program Technology provider companies, HP, IBM Corp. and Quantum Corp., will offer LTFS compliance testing to demonstrate compatibility with the open standard LTFS specification.

Tapes for the initial review cycle can be submitted to the LTO Program for testing starting May 1 through June 30, 2013. This process is intended to verify that an organization's offering produces an LTFS formatted LTO cartridge that complies with the LTFS format specification.

"Before capitalizing on LTO tape capacity and search capability innovations, clients must have confidence that the technology will integrate easily within heterogenous data center architectures," said Chris Powers, director, StoreEver solutions, HP. "By providing compatibility among mixed vendor platforms, LTO technology is gaining rapid marketplace acceptance among organizations that require simplified management and functionality without sacrificing long-term file retention benefits."

LTFS has expanded the role of LTO tape into new categories and applications where customers want the long-term retention benefits of tape but still need to easily find and use files. Companies with these needs are turning to LTO tape with LTFS to offload their digital media from more expensive storage options for archiving and transport.

Leath Mattner, data management for Digital Pictures, leveraged LTFS and LTO-5 tape solutions in the production of James Cameron's Deepsea Challenge project. According to Mattner, the LTO workflow system they used allowed them to "handle all of the camera formats and conform all of the different kinds of media directly from LTO tape which was a huge time saver."

Mark Peters, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, acknowledges that although capacity, performance and cost containment are dominating the headlines in storage, two other aspects are also crucial: providing consistency and being standards-based.

"These areas are precisely why the LTFS compliance testing from the LTO program matters," says Peters. "When users have multiple choices of interoperable solutions, they want to be sure that everything will work as designed. This new compliance testing adds certainty, and will of course help attract users who are thinking of committing to LTO and LTFS."

This LTFS compliance testing will be managed by the LTO Program.

LTFS takes advantage of the new partitioning feature that became available with LTO-5 technology to provide file system access to tape data and easier management such as drag and drop and search functionality. The LTFS specification is an open standard and has been provided to the SNIA for adoption.

WW Backup Appliance Market Revenue Grew 10% Y/Y in 4Q12, Capacity 43% - IDC

EMC easy leader in front of Symantec an IBM

Worldwide purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) factory revenues posted a 9.7% year-over-year increase, totaling $859.5 million in 4Q12, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker.

However, the total PBBA open systems market posted just under $567.5 million in revenues, representing 16.4% growth from the prior year's fourth quarter.

The total worldwide PBBA capacity shipped reach 455,254 terabytes, growing 42.9% year over year.

"The total worldwide PBBA market resumed robust growth in the fourth quarter of 2012. Overall, the worldwide PBBA market experienced strong growth in revenue, capacity, and shipments," said Robert Amatruda, research director, data protection and recovery, IDC. "Long-term, we expect the worldwide PBBA will continue to outpace the overall data protection and recovery software and hardware market as customers continue to embrace turnkey systems to alleviate their backup and recovery challenges."

Total Worldwide PBBA 4Q12 Results
EMC maintained its lead in the overall PBBA market with 66.5% revenue share in the fourth quarter, followed by Symantec and IBM and with 11.8% and 8.4% market share, respectively. Symantec exhibited strong year-over-year growth in the PBBA market in the fourth quarter of 2012 while HP and IBM saw their revenues decline.

Taxonomy Notes:
IDC defines a purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA) as a standalone disk-based solution that utilizes software, disk arrays, server engine(s), or nodes that are used for a target for backup data and specifically data coming from a backup application (e.g., NetWorker, NetBackup, TSM, and Backup Exec) or can be tightly integrated with the backup software to catalog, index, schedule, and perform data movement. The PBBA products are deployed in standalone configurations or as gateways. PBBA solutions deployed in a gateway configuration connect to and store backup data on general-purpose storage. Here, the gateway device is serving as the component that is purpose built solely for backup and not for supporting any other workload or application. Regardless of packaging (as an appliance or gateway), PBBAs can have multiple interfaces or protocols. Also, PBBAs often can provide and receive replication to or from remote sites and a secondary PBBA for the purpose of DR.