Overland Branches Out

Executives at the San Diego-based company showed the products to solution providers attending the company's annual partner summit in Miami the first week of September.

The new REO series of acceleration appliances back up data to hard disk for high-speed restores and to speed up data backups to tape. They feature Serial ATA hard drives and iSCSI connectivity.

The REO appliances are expected to support Sun Microsystems' Solaris, Linux, IBM AIX and Novell NetWare by December, said John Cloyd, vice president and general manager of Overland.

By next April, Overland expects to introduce an iSCSI-to-iSCSI bridge that allows long-distance tape backups to be done over IP networks, Cloyd said.

The vendor also showed off its NEO 8000 enterprise tape library, which is expected to ship in volume in December. The product will be scalable to a maximum of 20 tape drives and 500 cartridges, said Jim Jenkins, territory sales manager of the Southwestern U.S. at Overland. Future modules should let the NEO 8000 scale to up to 48 drives and 2,000 cartridges, he said.

Christopher Calisi, Overland's president and CEO, said the company remains committed to the midrange space even though it's extending into the enterprise.

Overland's REO appliances will help the company and its channel continue to drive the midrange backup business, said Tom Kuni, president of Sales Strategies, Metuchen, N.J. "All the larger enterprise vendors have been putting disks in front of their tape libraries," Kuni said. "The big systems integrators like EDS are also pushing hard into the midrange. Meanwhile, the CDWs and Insights are moving up into this space."

Some solution providers are pleased with Overland's plans to broaden its focus, too,HorizonTek, for one.

Overland is now ready to move into the enterprise, said John Zammett, president of HorizonTek, a solution provider based in Huntington, N.Y. "They can go after the competition in a real way," he said.