Storage Digest: News from NetApp, Overland, BakBone, Zantaz

Network Appliance announced July 19 it is integrating its NearStore VTL Shadow Tape backup product with Veritas NetBackup and similar product packages from BakBone, CommVault and Syncsort.

The integration will streamline enterprise data recovery and management for those companies data backup, recovery, and protection processes, a NetApp spokesperson said.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.,companys NearStore VTL Shadow Tape is a dedicated, enterprise-class storage appliance that emulates physical tape libraries, stores large capacities of backup data on disk, and automatically copies data to physical tape under backup application control within any open systems storage environment.

NearStore Virtual Tape Library is a disk-to-disk backup for all open-systems enterprise primary storage, including EMC, Hitachi and IBM storage environments, the company says.

"As a result of tight integration between backup applications and VTL solutions, enterprise customers are realizing that integration is a key ingredient to streamlining the success of their backups," said Mike Karp, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, in Westboro, Mass.

Resource Library:

"A cost-effective, efficient VTL solution means faster and more complete operations while at the same time protecting the customers pre-existing investment in scripts, procedures, and policies. IT sites can continue to utilize their backup applications as the control point for backup and recovery operations," Karp said.

Get more information here.

Overland Storage has expanded its suite of backup and recovery products with two new members of the ARCvault family of entry-level tape automation products.

The new ARCvault autoloaders and tape libraries deliver tape backup and archive capabilities to small and medium-size IT environments that need to protect large amounts of data—at the industrys lowest cost per gigabyte, a company spokesperson said.

The first models in the ARCvault product suite are the ARCvault 12 autoloader and ARCvault 24 rack-optimized library, which offer high capacity for small business and midrange backup, recovery and archive applications. The series provides up to 19.2TB of storage.

"In delivering ARCvault, Overland has taken a fresh look at the market," said Brian Garrett, industry analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group, in Milford, Mass. "The SMB [small and midsize business] market needs high-capacity, cost-effective and easy-to-use tape automation for backup and archive of critical data. With solid features and competitive differentiators, ARCvault adeptly fulfills this need."

Get more information here.

Data protection provider BakBone Software introduced NetVault Report Manager 3.0, a storage reporting and analysis software package with new features that consolidate and manage data protection operations and storage reporting through a centralized management console.

With this latest release, San Diego-based BakBone filled a gap in its line of software products while improving storage utilization across multiple sites, a company spokesperson said.

BakBone has added a new data manager option and a file-system archiving feature. This new capability offers greater storage resource management by enabling administrators to take action directly from file-level reports to move, copy, delete or archive files to tape by sending pick lists to NetVault Backup, a company spokesperson said.

Get more information here.

E-mail archive and compliance provider Zantaz, of Pleasanton, Calif., announced enhancements to its front-line product, First Archive, which centralizes mailbox management, compliant archiving and discovery readiness using any combination of hosted and on-site storage.

Enhancements include:

"With the volume of e-mail and electronic files continuing to explode, the number and dollar amounts of fines related to the failure to meet discovery requests and retention regulations will continue to grow," said Brian Babineau, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.

According to a 2005 study by Babineaus firm, e-mail has become the most frequently requested type of business record by courts and regulators.

"Seventy-seven percent of organizations involved in an electronic data discovery request say they have been asked to produce e-mail messages as part of a legal or regulatory proceeding," Babineau said.

"As a result, companies and their corporate counsel have an increased interest in new archiving technologies that encompass the full range of unstructured information and are integrated with robust discovery capabilities," he said.

Get more information here.

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