Overland Storage Moves Beyond Hardware With Intelligent Appliance

The company on Tuesday said its new REO Business Continuity Appliance works with its REO series of disk-based backup and recovery virtual tape libraries to simplify continuous local backup and remote disaster recovery.

The new appliance is aimed at small and midsize business customers who are short on money and IT skills but who, nonetheless, have a big need to meet their recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs), said Kevin Wise, senior product manager for the San Diego-based vendor.

The REO BCA performs application-aware gathering of data as it is stored and backed up, including making sure that data is consistent with the up-to-the-minute needs of a customer's Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and Windows and Linux file services applications, Wise said.

It works with physical and virtual storage, and with file-level or block-level data, in Windows and Linux environments to show customers what data is there, what can be compressed, what is backed up, and more, he said.

Should there be a problem with a customer's data, the REO BCA can do nondisruptive migration of an application and its data from a physical server to a virtual server, a physical server to another virtual server, a virtual server to a physical server, or a virtual server to another virtual server, Wise said.

"We installed filter drivers for the applications to show how it reacts to both the application and to data," he said. "It works with Exchange, SQL, and Windows and Linux file services now, and we're qualifying it for BlackBerry, SharePoint, MySQL and IIS [Internet Information Services] for the future."

The fact that Overland Storage is moving from its hardware focus to offering intelligence that gets closer to the application is a big deal, said Don McNaughton, vice president of sales at HorizonTek, a Huntington, N.Y.-based solution provider and Overland Storage partner.

"Customers want immediate recoverability for their Exchange and other applications," McNaughton said. "This will work with their existing backup infrastructure to give them complete protection. It's important Overland is putting this on a turnkey appliance. It has the software and hardware from one manufacturer, a company my customers know well."

Overland Storage's decision to expand beyond a focus on mainstream Microsoft applications is necessary, McNaughton said. "My accounts also work with Oracle and SharePoint," he said.

Also new from Overland Storage is the REO BCA Environmental Profiler software, which Wise said compares data traffic over several days and months from different servers and applications in order to help customers get started managing data proactively.

That application really simplifies partners' ability to show customers what they need to do to improve their storage environment, said Ravi Pendekanti, vice president of worldwide marketing for the storage vendor.

"It shows if there is an opportunity to further optimize a customer's environment, and how the REO BCA can help," Pendekanti said. "It's a great presale tool."

The REO BCA comes in two models. The REO BCA 100 comes with four hard drives and support for up to 20 or more application servers. The REO BCA comes in six hard drives and increased performance and capacity to support over 40 application servers. The hard drives are used for caching and optimizing data, not for storage.

List pricing starts at $24,000 for a unit that supports up to two application servers. They are currently shipping.