Customers will get months of storage on a disk-based appliance.Overland Storage has added deduplication technology to its REO virtual tape library appliance, allowing the products core audience—SMBs and distributed organizations—to store months of data on a disk-based appliance.
The REO 9500D deduplicating VTL appliance can be configured with up to 12 library partitions, 64 virtual tape drives and 3,000 virtual cartridges. Usable capacity stretches up to 187 TBs in a 5u chassis, and the product offers dual 4 GB/sec Fibre Channel host connectivity.
The appliance is especially well-suited to small and midsize businesses and distributed branches of larger organizations because of its all-in-one structure, wizard-driven GUI and fast installation, said Jeff Graham, senior product manager at the San Diego-based company.
"With this product, [customers] will be able to do virtually all of their backups and restores to disk and use tape strictly for archiving," Graham said. "That will extend the life of their tape devices and help them meet their service level agreements better."
Much of that capability is due to the incorporation of the ProtecTIER deduplication platform from Diligent Technologies.
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ProtecTIER is an in-line data deduplication technology, as opposed to doing deduplication on the application server where data is stored or doing it in parallel, which allows organizations to download and perform deduplication simultaneously. The second method, which some vendors use, doesnt require as much disk on the VTL but requires a lot of horsepower—something smaller organizations in particular dont often have, said Mike Karp, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates.
"The way Overland is doing it, data is de-duplicated on the VTL appliance before it is written to disk," Karp said. "Its efficient and you need less horsepower."
Although some criticize the in-line deduplication method because it is slower than other methods, Graham said Overland has done the necessary integration. "Weve made it efficient and fast enough that the performance is good enough for the vast majority of our customers," he said. "They will be able to meet their performance requirements within their backup windows."
The addition of deduplication—particularly Diligents technology—puts Overland on a level playing field with its main competitors, which include FalconStor Software and Sepaton, Karp said.
Although the REO 9500D is just being released, Overland continues to look ahead. The next step, Graham said, is to increase scalability for customers that may want it and find ways to add replication.
The REO 9500D comes in two models. Model OV-REO101094 has a base capacity of 3.75 TB, an estimated capacity of 45TB at 12:1 and an estimated capacity of 93.75TB at 25:1. That model starts at $65,400. Model OV-REO101095 has a base capacity of 7.5 TB, an estimated capacity of 90TB at 12:1 and an estimated capacity of 187.5TB at 25.1. That model starts at $108,300. Both are available this month through Overlands partners.
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